by Rio Youers
“Yes.”
“I chose the armor.”
Sometimes, when Mother Moon spoke, Shirley felt a flame inside her, beneath her soul, that lifted her like a balloon, so that her posture straightened and she raised her chin and looked at the world from a higher place.
“The island is made up of unraveled people,” Mother Moon continued. “I’m helping them become stronger. But strength is exhibited in the things we do—how we choose to shine. Sadly, not everybody has a light. I think you do.”
“I think so, too.”
Mother Moon sat in front of the fire. It crackled and snapped. The light turned her eyes into reddish cigar burns that looked like they might start smoking.
“Do you have scars, Shirley?”
“One,” Shirley replied. “On my knee. I fell off a swing when I was five years old.”
“Show me.”
Shirley showed her, rolling up the left leg of her pants. Mother Moon looked at it with her glowing eyes and smiled. “One scar. But oh, you’re young. Sixteen. Your destiny is still a blank canvas. You’ll add color, in time.”
Shirley rolled down her pants leg. She straightened and looked at Mother Moon longingly, as if the color might come from her.
“I wasn’t much older when it started for me,” Mother Moon said. “The pain, I mean. And every wound … every bruise and fracture was like a waypoint on my journey to Glam Moon. By the age of twenty-two I had traveled an unknowable distance and seen more light than there is in a thousand sunrises.”
The rain had picked up. It bounced against the window. Shirley liked the sound. Not the thunder, though. It muttered in the distance, then boomed.
“It exists, you know,” Mother Moon said. “It’s real.”
“I believe you.”
Mother Moon nodded and looked into the flames. Shirley considered the storm, wondering if she should go and keep an eye on Edith, who might be afraid. Instead she sat beside Mother Moon. Just for a little longer, she told herself, because she liked the warmth. Their bodies were years—and scars—apart, but in the flickering firelight their shadows were identical.
* * *
“Who are you?” the dog had asked.
“Your new girl,” Valerie replied. Eighteen years old, her legs sprinkled with sweat, her heart galloping inside her chest. She looked around the room, at the colorful paintings and hanging scrolls, the windows with their view across the Hackensack River. There was a chest against one wall, large enough to climb inside. An oval lantern floated from the ceiling like the cocoon of some fabulous moth.
She registered all this within seconds, but her attention was primarily given to the room’s occupants—these eight men in their expensive suits and detailed animal masks.
“She’s too young,” the snake said.
“She’s perfect,” the tiger said. He got out of his seat and stepped toward her, a tall man with large hands and a narrow middle. He touched her face, running his heavy ring across her cheekbone.
“Raven K. is dead,” Valerie said. “You’ve got me instead.”
The tiger clasped her jaw, angling her face from one side to the other. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” Valerie said, pulling away from him.
“Liar!” the ox snorted.
“It’s not a lie.”
“Do you know who we are?” the tiger snapped.
Valerie closed her mouth quickly. Her nostrils flared with heavy breaths. “No. And I don’t care, as long as the money is good.”
“Money,” the tiger said, and roared with laughter. The other animals did likewise. Some stomped their feet and pounded their fists across the walls. The room trembled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Before long,” the tiger said, “every new breath you take will feel like a million dollars.”
His fist came from nowhere. It connected with the top of Valerie’s head and knocked her down. She moaned and tried to get up, but couldn’t. When she touched her head, her fingers came away bloody.
“What…?” She looked disbelievingly at the blood, then up at the animals. They loomed above her in a wild circle.
“We are the Society of Pain,” the tiger said.
“What? I don’t—”
“Derevaun Seraun,” the snake cried, and this odd expression echoed around the room from many animal mouths, building in ferocity, until it became an animal sound: a growl or a howl or something equally inhuman.
Valerie pushed herself to one knee, then with a great effort managed to stand. Blood trickled into her left eye. She blinked it away as she reeled toward the door. “To hell … with you crazy fuckers.” But the rabbit blocked her path. He squealed something and pushed her back into the middle of the room. She nearly fell again but the ox caught her. He tossed her to the rooster, who bounced her along to the pig.
“Let me go. Let me—”
“You’re not going anywhere.” She was pushed to the tiger, who grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around. The goat stood in front of her. He had a hypodermic syringe in his hand. He stepped forward and thrust the needle into her neck. Her feet went numb first, then her knees. She folded and everything went black.
The last thing she was aware of was the tiger’s voice, dim and scratchy, as if he were speaking over a phone line with a bad reception: “Put her in the box. Let’s go eat.” And then, vaguely, someone grabbing her ankles and dragging her across the floor.
It was April 28, 1982. She was in the upstairs room of the White Lantern in Engine City, New Jersey, where she would stay for the next four years.
* * *
Valerie came to inside the box. She pushed against the lid but it was secured with a padlock, a hefty one judging by its clunky, rattling sound. She screamed for help but none came. She wept and kicked at the lid with the soles of her feet, then changed position and pushed at it with the dome of her back.
It was dark and silent everywhere. The restaurant was closed. The dead of morning, then. Confused and terrified, she started to pray, and was answered many hours later by the sound of the padlock clattering against the latch. The lid opened. Light flooded in. She was pulled from the box and collapsed onto the floor, fetal, covering her eyes.
She peered through the cracks of her fingers and saw the animals. The rooster held a knife.
“No, no, oh God no—”
She crawled toward the door. Her arms and legs felt limp and weak and her head throbbed. The ox grabbed her by the upper arm and yanked her back.
“What do you want with me?”
“We’re fetishists,” the tiger responded calmly. “Paraphiliacs, if you want to be all fancy about it. Our kink is pain. Specifically, the pain of others.”
The rooster coolly stepped toward her and flashed the knife across her thigh. Her skin opened in a thin red ribbon. She screamed, slapped her hand over it, watched the blood ooze through her fingers.
“Please…”
The rabbit pushed one hand inside his pants and started to rub himself.
I’m not getting out of this alive, she thought.
“Take her clothes off,” the tiger said. “Let’s see how many times we can cut her before she passes out.”
Valerie was way ahead of them. Her eyes rolled upward into her skull and she dropped into a cold faint where she felt nothing and saw no light.
* * *
She rose from her faint to find the goat stitching the gash on her leg with a curved suture needle and black thread. His fingers were bloody. There was another wound, already stitched, on her right hip. Another just below her left armpit.
“Goat,” she said groggily.
“These will heal soon,” he said.
“We can mend broken bones, too,” the dog said, spinning the ring on his finger. “This will go on and on.”
“And on,” the pig said.
“And on,” the snake said.
* * *
Food came every other day. She was let out of the box to eat it. B
land Chinese food. Noodles. Rice. Chicken. Sometimes fish. She wolfed it down with grunts and snarls.
A fat Chinese man—the restaurateur, she supposed—brought it to her. He had a key to the padlock, but wasn’t one of the eight. He was too short and overweight.
She mostly ate with her fingers but sometimes he brought chopsticks.
* * *
“The end of pleasure is pain,” the tiger said. It was just the two of them. Valerie guessed it was Sunday morning; there was an absence of traffic noise and she thought she’d heard church bells, although that might have been something she’d dreamed. Not that it mattered. Friday, Tuesday, Sunday … every day was the same in this room.
“Take away the pleasure, only pain remains.”
“Fuck you.”
The tiger lounged on one of the sofas, wearing an open-throated shirt and Levi’s. Valerie lay on the floor. They had broken her leg with a hammer and set it with a splint. She could barely move.
“Pain shows us what we can do, how much we can endure, physically and spiritually. It’s also a gateway. Think about it. Self-flagellation, asceticism, fasting, perceptual isolation … all rooted in pain, and all practiced for the acquirement of purity, enlightenment, heightened awareness…” The tiger crossed his legs. He wore expensive loafers, no socks, and appeared incredibly relaxed. “When pleasure is denied, the channel to new possibilities, and alternate experiences, becomes broader.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Valerie groaned. She licked her dry lips and slumped against the wall. One of her wounds started to bleed through its ugly black stitching.
“We’ve traveled the world in pursuit of pain,” the tiger continued. “We’ve spoken to people who’ve lost limbs, beaten cancer, survived plane crashes. We’ve heard stories about epiphanies, spiritual awakenings, hallucinations, astral projection, psychic development. Several people—from different parts of the world—claimed to have crossed into an alternate dimension, a place of warmth and healing.”
Valerie’s eyes rolled toward the tiger. She didn’t believe him, but what he’d said filled her with a deep and longing ache. It sounded like a way out. Perhaps her only way out.
“A different world,” she said.
“So we’ve heard. The common theory is that it’s a hallucination brought on by the release of DMT in the pineal gland.” The tiger stood up, walked over to Valerie, and placed the sole of his loafer against her throat. “But what if it’s more than that? What if this alternate world truly exists, and the only way in is through the absence of pleasure?”
* * *
She lost track of time quickly. Even the seasons—long, hot summer days and icy white winters—lost their relevance. That was an outside thing, beyond the room, a world she didn’t belong to and couldn’t reach. It was an America that didn’t realize she was missing.
Her internal clock failed. She’d always been regular with her menstrual cycles but the physical and emotional trauma knocked everything out of line. She cramped and bled for weeks—months?—and then everything shut down. Her body, as well as her country, had become a thing she didn’t know. She never forgot her name, where she was born, or the hateful face of her father, but in every other way she lost her identity, even her humanness.
A set of bamboo wind chimes outside the door announced their arrival. It was a mockingly bright sound that paradoxically came to encompass everything dark. Valerie heard it most days, usually more than once. The animals sometimes came alone but more often in twos and threes. Rooster and pig. Dog and snake. Tiger, goat, and rabbit. She might go a long time without seeing one of them, then they’d reappear and continue their torment without missing a beat. She eventually stopped paying attention to the frequency and combination of their visits. It didn’t matter. It just was. Only those occasions when they were all present really registered. They were the worst.
Sometimes they had hammers, tire irons, or good old-fashioned baseball bats. One strike with a blunt, heavy instrument would usually break a bone (or two), or at the very least crack it. On other occasions they came with sharper tools: knives, razor blades, scissors, chisels. They brought a nail gun once, one of several power tools Valerie saw during her four years in that room. The picana was a favorite device: a copper-tipped prong wired up to a car battery, administering high voltage, low current shocks, usually to her most sensitive areas. Valerie wondered if they produced this terrible apparatus on special occasions. Birthdays, perhaps, or Thanksgiving.
Most of the time they waited for her to heal—usually courtesy of Dr. Goat—before using another heavy-duty tool. But they weren’t averse to building hurt on top of hurt, wound on top of wound.
We’re fetishists, the tiger had said to her at the beginning of this nightmare. Our kink is pain. Their fascination with the subject was terrifying, whether they were trying to unlock a parallel dimension or explore—and thus understand—their appalling darkness. They partook and observed with equal measures of euphoria. It was sexual, too, of course. They rarely touched her, but frequently indulged in one another—sucking, jerking, and fucking. Except for the tiger, who kept his clothes on. The tiger was a watcher.
Her spirit withered, then died. Eventually they stopped locking her in the box and chained her to a ringbolt in the floor, and they even stopped doing this after a while. She was too weak to do much more than groan and drag herself around the room. Mostly, she slumped against the wall, smeared with her own piss and feces—at least until the restaurateur scrubbed it away. She tried the door on occasion but it was always locked. She even—in a rare moment of fortitude and anger, perhaps proving that her spirit wasn’t completely dead—threw a chair against the window. The glass was reinforced, though. Probably soundproof, too. The chair bounced back into the room. Heartbreaking. At that point, she hadn’t been looking to escape, but to throw herself thirty feet to the concrete below. Death was a way out, after all, and certainly more attainable than crossing into an alternate world.
Or so she thought.
The Society kept her alive. They meted out the pain and torture, taking her to the brink and then letting her heal. The goat cleaned and dressed her wounds. Infections were fought with antibiotics. They crammed white rice into her mouth when she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—eat, and poured water down her throat until she choked.
She couldn’t live forever, though; the damage to her spirit was beyond healing. Death was the only thing she prayed for—and to. It offered peace, escape, an end to her suffering …
“Take me, please…”
It became her god, her salvation.
“Take me now.”
And it was while praying to this strange but certain god that she noticed the split in the air. She was lying on her back staring up at the ceiling—at the lantern, in fact, glowing softly above her. The split flashed like a coin catching light. Her dry lips stopped moving and she stared at it for a long time, thinking it must be a small tear in the lantern’s paper skin. Only it couldn’t be, because it was clearly beyond the lantern, in the same way that the stars were beyond the sky.
She reached with one trembling hand. The split grew steadily, from one inch to two … to four. And soon it wasn’t the split that fascinated her; it was the blue sky beyond.
* * *
It had pull and shine.
Two things happened as the split lengthened to a rift. The pull: Valerie felt herself being lifted clear off the floor, levitating in midair with her legs hanging limply. The shine: she felt her spirit being revitalized, like a wilted flower in sunlight.
She reached with both hands. Tears leaked from her eyes, rolled to her ears, and plinked three feet to the floorboards below.
“What are you?”
The edges of the rift billowed. A cleaner, different air wafted over her skin, filled with aromas of water and peach. She continued to ascend, but slowly, and thought that any moment she would hear the chimes on the other side of the door—that bright, jingle-jangle music. The animal
s would return with their hammers and knives. They’d grab her ankles and drag her down, only this time she would fight.
* * *
The feeling was similar to the hypnic jerks she sometimes experienced on the edge of sleep—a sudden falling sensation, only this time she fell upward. She passed through the rift and everything was brighter. It was, in fact, too much, a sensory overload. Valerie could only huddle and absorb her new environment in tiny, manageable increments. She trembled and wept, as much with happiness as fear.
I made it out.
Yes, she did. But this wasn’t death. The grass beneath her was full and green. It had a sweet, wine-like scent. The flowers nearby shimmered. She crawled through them, inhaling aromas she had no name for. Their coppery stems brushed against her skin and she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were reaching for her, as if to check if she was real. She did likewise. She stroked them, tasted her fingers. Small, delighted sounds escaped her lips for the first time in years.
There was a bone-white forest on the other side of the flowers. The trees were tall and regal and their branches danced. Now Valerie got to her feet. Her legs were stronger. She didn’t shuffle or stagger. She walked. It felt strange to be perfectly upright, like a human.
Don’t let this be a dream, she thought. I don’t ever want to leave this place.
She touched the trees’ white bark, her fingers trailing from one trunk to the next. Tears continued to stream from her eyes and she slapped them away, almost laughing now. She scampered to the next tree and threw her arms around it. “I’m not leaving here. I’m never leaving.” She kissed the bark, rested her tired head against it. “Never … never.” Then she whirled from the forest to the edge of a river. It ran clear and shallow. She drank like a deer then washed her face. Given everything she’d endured, there was no way she should feel as good—as strong—as she did.
She swept downriver to where it was deeper and dived in.
* * *
Deep. There was a mild current and she let it carry her. When she opened her eyes she saw exotic river weed and flickering fish. She kicked her legs and followed them, tiny bubbles rippling from her nose. She opened her lungs and breathed.
