Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Concerning Attrition and Severance

  You may call this place a room, in the sense that it is “a space that is or may be occupied,” and may fairly be described as “an area separated by walls and partitions from other similar parts of the structure or building in which it is located.” So, call it a room, and the authors of dictionaries may, at least, be placated and satisfied with your pronouncement. And yet, none of those who come here have entered by way of a door or window or any other such contrivance of three-dimensional architecture. Some have been here so long there remains no recollection of their arrival. Some were fashioned to exist nowhere else, and others have arrived, by unfathomable agencies, only in the last fraction of a second. The ceiling, floor, and walls appear to be no more than dusty slabs of poured concrete, and the darkness of this place is broken only by the flicker of a few clusters of pillar candles placed here and there, beacons shining in the gloom like the bioluminescent organs of abyssal anglerfish or gulper eels. In the end, the candles’ glow serves only to underscore the tyranny of this darkness, and they are permitted more as a lark than through any sincere desire for illumination. Those who occupy this space (making it a room), if they have need of eyes, they have eyes which have little or no need of the vagaries of the “visible” spectrum. And they need not be named, either, these occupants, though, inevitably, they have been gifted by men with innumerable names. Those women and men who fear the dark have named them, again and again, in acts of grand and masterful futility, as humanity often seeks, through nomenclature, to subjugate that which it fears. But those names are never spoken here, unless it is in jest (akin to the placing of the aforementioned candles).

  There are furnishings and various other accoutrements and instruments scattered about, though accurate descriptions of many of these objects would escape a mind accustomed to more mundane Euclidean geometries. But, because the occupants here are only the most devoted species of collectors aid practitioners, drawing their devices of pain and supplication from very many planes of existence, others of these objects shall undoubtedly appear more conventional, more familiar, to human eyes. There are curtains, or veils, of some indeterminable, diaphanous material strung from the high ceilings and reaching down almost to the floor, and these draperies stir with unaccountable freezes, or stray sighs. And, sometimes, they drip, as well, spattering that dusty floor with all the four humours of classical medicine—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic. And, on one side of this room, placed flush against one wall, there is a pant of focus and activity, which, for the sake of convenience, we shill name a stage. The stage is raised some distance above the level of the floor, that all might have an unobstructed view, and access is gained by way of a low flight of stairs.

  In this room, upon this stage, a scenario is unfolding, the latest in a functionally infinite set of conceivable scenarios begun ages before this particular moment. A tall woman stands before a kneeling woman (and here, again, a word—woman—is chosen more with regard to convenience than to accuracy, and for want of some more applicable, more prosaic noun). The woman who stands wears skin as perfectly white as any block of Parian marble, and she is attired in a curious sort of costume, a dress that seems borrowed, in equal parts, from the retinue of Marie Antoinette and the brothels of 1890s Montmartre. A pair of pince-nez spectacles with smoked lenses sit upon the bridge of her nose, and about her neck hangs a finely wrought silver chain, and on the chain is affixed a pendant containing a single exquisite step-cut ruby. In her right hand, she holds a pearl-handled straight razor, folded open, and the steel blade glimmers red and wet. Her compatriot in this moment wears a skin that is merely pale, and this second woman is entirely naked, save a ruby necklace identical to that worn by the first. The second woman’s arms are raised high above her head and her wrists lashed together and then bound with rough jute cord to a wooden post set into the stage.

  During the years 1888 to 1891, the white-skinned woman stalked the filthy, crowded streets and alleyways of London’s poverty-blighted East End, and her insatiable razor (a being in and of itself, perhaps) was glutted on the wantons and harlots of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. She recites their names lite a holy litany or a checklist of heroic deeds, all their names and the places where she left their mutilated corpses to be found—Wary Ann “Polly” Nichols at Durward Street, Catherine Eddowes at Mitre Square, Elizabeth Stride at Berner Street, Martha Tabram at George Yard, Mary Jane “Ginger” Kelly at No. 13 Miller’s Court, and so on and so forth. She memorized the epistles that she penned to the detectives of Scotland Yard and to the press, as well as many of those written by various of her imitators and copycats, and, on some occasions (though obviously not this occasion), it is sufficient merely to recite those letters, and the audience will find itself briefly satiated. The mad exploits of “Saucy Jack,” as she styled herself in those hectic years; she’ll pause, now and then, to sing out a “fare thee well, my fairy Fay,” recalling Christmas of 1887 and a prostitute whose name she didn’t take the time to learn.

  Thus far, the bound and kneeling woman has suffered only superficial lacerations to her face and back and buttocks, paper-cut signatures marking the most casual flicks of the white woman’s blade. But the crowd is getting hungry, and that hunger breeds impatience. So the time has come to set aside this schoolyard teasing and commit some more memorable mischief. There was a slight, earlier, whether real or imagined, an insult to the white woman’s person committed by the one who is now trussed before her. And here, in this place we may call a room, this vicious show of skill and control counts as remuneration. The white woman reaches down to clutch the ruby pendant draped about her victim’s neck, and she gives the silver chain the slightest tug before she speaks.

  “You wear my tear,” she says, speaking hardly above a whisper, then releases the pendant so that it dangles once again between the other woman’s breasts. “Now, I will taste a few of yours, I think.” And then, speaking louder, the white woman addresses all the Others.

  “I can take anything others I wish, for she is mine. Bound to me. And I desire to take her life.”

  And, having so spoken, the white woman is pleased by the shining sliver of fear sparking somewhere behind the bound woman’s eyes. The white woman smiles, and the audience murmurs and waits and does all those things which make it something we may (not quite arbitrarily) call an audience.

  “Yesterday,” the white woman continues, “that’s what I would have done. But now... now I’ll have to settle for a little less.”

  Somewhere among those avid, solicitous watchers, who have here been designated an “audience” a third woman smiles, pleased by what she hears. If beings such as these ever had need of mothers, then she might fairly be thought the mother of the white woman on the stage, or, at least, the author of her current molecular configuration and metaphysical condition. In fact, let us use the phrase Mater Puerorum, following the work of the Persian alchemist and philosopher Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Rãzi (865-925 AD). This third woman-also marble white, but incalculably older and more puissant than the one whom we may, strictly for the purpose of this narrative, consider to be her daughter—has set forth the conditions of the scenario at hand. Though the white woman on stage is, by the fluctuating rules of this place, permitted satisfaction for any insult or trespass, tonight she must also exhibit, for all assembled to witness, the virtues of restraint and self-abnegation, a quality for which she is not especially (and, truthfully, not even remotely) renowned.

  “The word, tonight, is Control,” says the white woman, delivering those last two syllables like a gut punch, like a tailing star, and the audience laughs among itself. The white woman ignores them and speaks now directly to the one kneeling before her. “And, it occurs to me, belatedly, that I should set forth a number, placing a limit upon myself and how many times I may strike. And so the number shall be ten, for the number ten has always pleased me.” And now the white woman recites ten examples of the significance of the number ten, no
thing that they do not all know, of course, but there is ritual to be observed. She ticks them off on the porcelain fingers of her left hand, citing: the Judeo-Christian Decalogue, the tenth concerning the coveting of a neighbor’s wife or ass or house or what have you; the ten incarnations of the Hindi supreme deity Vishnu; the tenth sephiroth of the Tree of Life, Malkuth, which, according to the Qabalah, completes the decad and leads, then, back to god; Pythagoras’ contention that ten is the perfect number, tireless and comprehending all harmonic and arithmetic proportions; the precise sum of carbon atoms present in the alkaline hydrocarbon decane; the ten plagues visited upon Egypt, as recorded in Exodus; the atomic number of the element neon; Gui, the tenth celestial stem in Chinese astrology; the claim that ten is the smallest of the infinite string of noncototients; and, finally, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

  “And already,” says the white woman, “I have delivered three of my ten strokes,” and she points to the seeping cuts on the kneeling woman’s body. “Which leaves me only seven remaining. And not even seven, for to show more fully my devotion to this thing

  - control—I shall hold back my tenth stroke, and we can, perhaps, count this a demonstration of mercy, as well.” And that last bit elicits a hearty round of laughter from the audience, for they know the white woman too well, and so know that she is, and always shall be, incapable of mercy.

  “So,” says the white woman to her supplicant, “six to go, and I would have you count them out for me aloud, lest I forget my place and fail this... lesson.”

  The kneeling woman nods.

  The razor flicks, almost too fast to be followed by these eyes and not-eyes, and it drawls a deep gash across the kneeling woman’s forehead, and soon blood is flowing down into her eyes, blinding her.

  “Four,” she says, dutifully, and everyone can plainly hear the dread nestled in her voice, the certainty that, even with only five strokes remaining to her tormentor, and even given the temperate nature of the first four strokes, there is yet the threat of inconceivable harm.

  “Would it not be somewhat more entertaining,” says the carmine-skinned “man” who, in this moment, serves as consort to the white woman’s Mater Puerorum, “if you, perchance, made her want these castigations?” He yawns then, sounding more than slightly bored.

  Hearing this, the white woman on stage affects a dramatic frown, the very mask of Tragedy, and then she knots the fingers of her left hand in the kneeling woman’s auburn hair. The white woman forces her supplicant’s head back, her chin up, so that she must now squint through the haze of her own blood into the face of her harrier (the bound woman, for all her faults, knows better than to close her eyes).

  “Do you hear the clamoring mob?” the white woman asks. “They want you to want it. And, always, must we amuse and satisfy that bloody, fucking mob, yes?”

  The kneeling woman doesn’t reply, knowing all her cues and that this is not one of them.

  “Bread and circuses,” the white woman sighs, and then she disentangles her fingers from the kneeling woman’s hair, and in a considerable rustle of stiff crinolines, she sits down upon the stage beside her victim. She draws the pad on an index finger across that freely bleeding brow, then licks her finger clean.

  “Sweet, almost,” she says. “If one has a taste for fool. Me, I wish my fool to become more than a fool.” And then, with no prefacing remark or forewarning, she flicks the steel blade down and cleanly slices away the kneeling woman’s left nipple. She screams for the first time since the exhibition began.

  And now there is a half-hearted smattering of applause from the audience, a grudging rumble of approval, and, in the darkness, the white woman’s Mater Puerorum smiles again and nips at the shoulder of her carmine-skinned escort, nipping with incisors and eyeteeth that would put any predator from any world to shame.

  “So nice to see an accomplished artist at work, don’t you think?” she asks, expecting no reply and receiving none.

  On stage, the white woman sits contemplating the severed pink button of flesh as the cavernous room echoes and then devours both the scream and the sound of applause.

  “Now, was that four?” she asks. “Or was that five? I fear I have quiet entirely lost track. I might have to start over again—”

  “Five,” the bound and kneeling woman gasps.

  “Arc you sure) Five already?”

  “Yes, yes, five. It was five, I swear.”

  “Five. A hallowed number. Then that leaves me only four, correct?”

  “Yes,” the kneeling woman says, struggling to nod her head, and blood and sweat drips from her brow, falling like rain across the concrete.

  “Very well, then,” the white woman replies, sounding slightly disappointed. “Now, please, be so kind as to open your mouth for me.”

  “Five,” the kneeling woman says, uttering the word for the fourth time and, in so doing, earning gales of laughter from the watchers pressing in about the edges of the stage, that voracious, taunting organism of many individuals which we have called only an audience.

  “Open... your... mouth,” the white woman says again, and in a tone that leaves no doubt she has tired of asking and will not bother to ask again. The bound woman’s eyes flash shock and confusion, but she does as she’s been told.

  “Good girl,” purrs the white-skinned woman, and she slips the nipple past quivering lips and into the open mouth, pushing it beneath the tongue of her victim.

  “Now, be careful. I’d not want you to swallow that. And, make no mistake, I will slice your throat if you do something silly like spit it out.” And then, whispering a whisper so low that she’s sure the audience cannot hear her, she adds, “Ear to fucking ear.” The kneeling woman nods, a curt, perfunctory nod, and she tries not to dwell on exactly what has been placed beneath her tongue, and failing, she tries not to gag.

  There is a new round of discontented mutterings from the audience, for any given act of savagery can only slake its thirst for just so long, and now that period of time has expired. Well aware how quickly the worm may turn (though, it should be noted, there are no worms in this place we call a room), how readily painter can find herself a canvas, the white woman tightens her grip upon the razor and slides it between the thighs of the kneeling, bound, and only pale (but growing ever paler) woman. The razor does not yet touch her flesh, but lingers, millimeters from her sex, indecisive or merely teasing, merely drawing out the moment, stalling the unavoidable.

  “Now, my sweet,” the white woman says, “a quick riddle to amuse our friends. Tell me, is my blade facing up, or is it, instead, facing down?”

  The kneeling woman’s lips part slightly, and her eyes, which have become muddy and glazed with the burden of exhaustion and pain, abruptly grow both clearer and wider, swelling with new fear.

  “Tell me. Tell me quick. They’re all waiting on your answer.” And when moments pass and still no answer is delivered, nothing but that uncertain, frightened stare, the white woman growls, “Tell me now!”

  When the woman bound to the post speaks, she takes great care that the severed nipple does not slip from beneath her tongue. “Up,” she says, not knowing, but making her best educated guess based on the reputation of the white woman, this creature who was once Saucy Jack, and who, more than a century before the Whitechapel mystery, prowled murderous on all fours through the forests and vales of the Margeride Mountains of France, nameless, but earning for herself the epithet La bête du Gévaudan. And some one hundred and fifty years before the ravages at Gévaudan, she was known—in at least one worldline—as the Hungarian Countess Bathory Erzsebet, before finally growing tired of that game and the endless mutilation and slaughter of peasant girls and the daughters of the lower gentry who had been sent to learn courtly etiquette in her gynaeceum at Castle Csejte.

  “Are you quite sure of that?” the white woman asks.

  “Yes,” the kneeling woman replies. “Yes, up.”

  And, at first, the white woman only smiles, but then the smile breaks
apart into ugly gales of laughter, and she kisses her victim’s forehead and then her left cheek and, finally, her trembling lips.

  “Yes!” the white woman proclaims. “You are such a perfectly brilliant fool, my doll. Up! Of course, it’s lip!” And with that, she slams the blade heavenward, slicing deep into the labial folds and vagina of the kneeling woman.

  We do not need to note the screams, nor describe their specific attributes. Her screams are a given.

  Shivering now, held upright only by the ropes about her wrists and sliding quickly into shock, she whispers “Six,” and the white woman nods approvingly, then yanks back on the mother of pearl-inlayed handle, pulling her razor free.

  We need not note the screams.

  “A wicked shame... it was not... down,” the white woman sighs breathlessly, grinning and intoxicated by the violence of her handiwork. The audience, once again won over and approving, offers up wolf whistles and shouts of “Brava!” and more applause. And the walls of this black space that we here call a room seem to shift and settle ever so slightly, so that dust sifts down from above, and the diaphanous curtains undulate in a sudden, fetid gust of displaced air.

  The white woman stares at her razor for some length of time, feeling the wind from those inconstant walls and recalling a thousand other cuts, and then she pauses to lap at the kneeling woman’s tears, thereby making good on her promise. She brushes the kneeling woman’s sweaty, blood-slick hair back from her eyes.