Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Do not worry,” the white woman says. “Maybe I’ll even stitch it closed for you later. Rut... first, we must finish the task at hand, what we have started, for it is the worst sort of sin to leave a story unfinished, or so I have come to believe.”

  “Six,” the kneeling woman says again, her voice hardly more than a ragged sigh.

  “Yes, dear, six—but only five, my sweet. Which leaves yet three remaining. You can handle three, can’t you?” And then, quickly, before there is time fora reply, the white woman’s blade—that sixth finger of her right hand, and also one of the many puppeteers who mind the strings of her will—hacks through the left ear of the kneeling woman.

  We need not note the screams.

  Someone in the audience calls out, “Come now! That one was old when van Gogh did it!” And the white woman snarls and tosses the flap of cartilage and skin in the general direction of the complaining voice.

  “Seven,” she says, and never mind the possibility that they might think this somehow a show of weakness, not demanding the count from her supplicant. “And that leaves two.”

  “Well, at least she can fucking count,” the carmine-skinned man mutters to the white woman’s Mater Puerorum, and, nearby, someone else chuckles softly to him- or her- or itself.

  “You haven’t gone and swallowed that nipple, have you?” the white woman asks, and it seems to take the better part of an hour for the bound and kneeling woman to shake her head no.

  “Good, good. I think it might look pretty, pickled and floating in a jar of formalin. But, moving along to my second from last stroke...” and now the white woman seizes her victim’s right hand, taking care to select the middle finger from the rest, and she immediately begins to force it backwards. “You insulted me,” she says. “You challenged me. You dared to even suggest I was something less than what I am.”

  The middle finger pops loudly, dislocating at the knuckle, but there is no scream this time. The kneeling woman merely shudders, her pain-wracked body convulsing once before it is still again. And, as though incensed by the empty place the scream should have filled, the white woman growls and bares her long canines.

  “I have murdered stars in my time,” she growls. “I have scorched worlds, and you would dare to doubt me?”

  When the dislocated finger has been forced so far that it rests flat against the back of the bound woman’s hand, the razor flicks again, slicing the finger free at the violated joint.

  “We shall call that eight,” the white woman hisses, and “Eight,” her victim whispers, replying unexpectedly.

  And now the white woman peering out through the windows of her tinted pince-nez—this one who is no longer Jack the Ripper nor La bête nor the Countess Bathory, and who is not, in this instant, driving a healthy yellow star to premature supernova—she permits herself the luxury of forgetting all those watching on. What happens next will be for her and her alone and the rest be damned (though, as it happens, simple, unobtainable damnation probably would come as a relief to the lot of them). She reaches down to the thatch of the bound woman’s pubic hair, and easily slips the detached finger into her—blood making such an excellent lubricant—then works it in and out, in and out, time after time after time.

  “You doubted me,” she says again. “Now, as they say, you can fuck yourself, sweet.” She laughs, and though all the Others also laugh at her joke, at her wit and cleverness, she doesn’t hear them. She shoves the finger in a final time, pushing it all the way to the opening of the cervix and leaving it there.

  “Don’t you let that slip out,” the white woman whispers and laughs again. Then she asks how many that makes, and how many she has remaining before she has taken her full measure of satisfaction. And because the lesson is Control, she waits in an affected mimicry of patience for the reply, and around her the curtains rustle intrigue and secrets and lies. And this indefinable space we have defined waits, also, as do the indefinable beings who have herein been designated Audience. All this time, all this pain and fury, all this void and unplumbed darkness, poised forever upon an invisible fulcrum. And then the answer comes, as it must, and the white woman lifts her razor again.

  Rappaccini’s Dragon

  (Murder Ballad No. 5)

  Flower and maiden were different and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)

  1.

  The young man’s work would be so much simpler if he were merely desirous his own death. A minute dose from any number of the glass vials or stoppered bottles in his possession, and the matter of his life would be quickly, and, if he so chose, painlessly concluded. Suicide, he knows well enough, is rarely farther away than the reach of his arm, or the distance from any given point to the spacious, but stuffy, room situated in one corner of the old greenhouse, the room that he’s converted into his apothecary, his laboratory, his grand mephitical cabinet. But his own death is not his goal, though accomplishment of that goal will likely, in time, mean his death. And the young man, whose name is Daniel, has long since made peace with this inevitability. If the end of his miserable life is the price of justice, than it is a price he is willing to pay.

  And on any given night, during the course of the last year, he may be found sitting alone at the cluttered table cobbled together from salvaged scraps of plywood and nails. He sits on his stool and reads aloud from Cassarett and Doull’s Toxicology: The Basic Science of Poisons or the monthly journal of the Society of Toxicology from M. D. Ellis’ Dangerous Plants, Snakes, Arthropods, and Marine Life or perhaps Haddad, Shannon, and Winchester’s Clinical Management of Poisoning and Drug Overdose. He sits here, and he reads, and he makes his meticulous notes and calculations, or he busies himself with the menagerie of banded kraits, Gaboon vipers, mambas, rattlesnakes, black-widow spiders, brightly colored dart frogs, Ethiopian deathstalker scorpions, caterpillars of the Lonomia obliqua moth, and Tasmanian inchman ants, those and two dozen other highly venomous terrestrial taxa. All must be properly fed and cared for, and, too, all must be milked. There are aquaria, as well, ten and twenty-five gallon tanks containing zebrafish, stonefish, weeverfish, blue-ringed octopi, various species of sea urchins, box jellies, and cone snails.

  Beyond his laboratory, the old greenhouse itself is a cornucopia of virulent leaves and blossoms, roots and berries. There are pots and pallet boxes of nightshade, columbine, Jack-in-the-pulpit, buttercup, foxglove, monkshood, baneberry, blood root, bleeding heart, rock poppy, mandrake, and several varieties of Rhododendron and Iris. The young man named Daniel is especially proud of his success growing numerous forms of wild fungi, a collection which includes, but is by no means limited to, Amanita mushrooms, Ink Copernicus (only toxic when consumed in conjunction with alcoholic beverages), and the False Morel, Gyromitra esculenta. This is his bountiful Jardin d’Éden, his edinu, and every carefully chosen stalk is a cultivar of the original Tree of Conscience.

  Only a handful of deadly animals and plants have eluded his acquisition, for one reason or another. The slow loris, for example, though its toxin is not particularly dangerous, he has savored the irony of employing in his endeavors a poisonous primate. He has also failed to acquire any other genus of venomous mammal, such as the insectivorous Solenodon of Cuba and Haiti, or a duck-billed platypus, or even one of the three relatively common sorts of poisonous shrews. Rut Daniel tries (though often in vain) not to let himself fret overly on these few missing bits of his garden, for he is keenly aware that the most lavish sort of overkill was surpassed quite some time ago.

  It has, now, become more than anything else a question of distillation, combination, recombination, concentration, refinement, formulation, and so forth, and, too, the vexing and perilous problem of finding the absolute tolerance of his own regrettably fragile corpus. So, he labors here with pipettes and flasks, centrifuge and test tubes, hypodermic needles and stereomicroscopy. No mean task, no walk in the park, and already there have been a number of near-fatal mistakes. Bu
t from each one of these has he learned more of the necessity of patience. And, to be sure, the young man fears nothing now so much as futility and failure, that a single inattentive or reckless moment could ruin it all. And so he proceeds at the pace his work demands, always keeping desire at his back, that it might drive him forward, but never take the lead and spell disaster.

  On this night, near the end of summer, he takes up a dried bit of fly agaric and works at it with mortar and pestle, and, now and again, he glances over his shoulder to seethe pallid shafts of moonlight falling across the long, straight rows of his garden.

  2.

  It begins here, let’s say, on some other night, nowhere near the end of summer, but in some interminable month of gales and ice and frostbitten windowpanes. It begins before the assemblage of Daniel’s garden, for few fairy tales are ever truthful in asserting that “Once upon a time...” is the genuine start of the story at hand. Little Red Riding Hood must have had a history of straying from the path and talking to wolves. We are never told through what alchemy or dark art the poor miller’s daughter came to be able to spin straw into gold. And what event, exactly, was the author of the Queen’s longing for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the embroidery frame?” There is always the beginning before the beginning, as all beginnings are, by degrees and necessarily, arbitrary. Prick any seemingly straightforward narrative, and it will, soon enough, hemorrhage infinite regression, the events contained therein falling back upon themselves like neatly arranged lines of wooden dominos. Not a hungry wolf, nor a spinning wheel, nor a distracted royal finger stabbed while embroidering, but a thousand prefacing occurrences, too inconvenient and indirect to be related in simple childhood fables. But, that said, we will begin here, on this cold and moonless night.

  There was a party, an especial sort of party for those with especial predilections. It was, in fact, the sort of party that Daniel and his twin-whom will not herein be named—frequented, for purposes having more to do with their own predilections than the money that men and women at these gatherings sometimes gave them in exchange for their company, their services, or nothing more than their stray thoughts. The twins were never poor, their mother having died and left to them a small, but sufficient, fortune deriving from the family’s granite quarries far away in Massachusetts, and also from holdings in diamond mines in Russia and Botswana. Fortunately, it was a small fortune that demanded very little of their actual attention, for neither possessed much in the way of business acumen. Their finances were managed by an aged and odd sort of fellow named Stebbins, and more than once he had waved his monthly fees in exchange for a few hours alone with the twins.

  On the night of this particular party, both Daniel and his brother had drunk more than was their custom, and well before dawn, they’d left, accompanying an admittedly peculiar heterosexual couple dressed all in white leather and white silk and the man and woman both wearing white mil polish and white lipstick. They called for a car, and the limousine ferried the four of them uptown to a loft with hardwood floors and redbrick walls hung with an assortment of paintings by someone named Albert Perrault, whom the white couple explained had recently been killed in a motorcycle accident in France. The painting depicted various black-a-vised and only vaguely defined grotesqueries, all of which made Daniel uneasy to look at for very long, and so he didn’t. The furniture was upholstered in white leather, and the kitchen tiles were the same immaculate, snowy hue, as were the bedroom walls and bedspreads and satin drapes.

  There were more drinks, and there were tabs of ecstasy, and then Daniel was tied to a white-enameled chair with lengths of nylon rope the color of cream. This was nothing unusual, in and of itself, and even the gag, with its white silicone ball, had sounded no alarms. The party, as noted already, catered to those with certain needs, and this was only the latest variation on a scene that the twins had played out numerous times before. The chair sat at the foot of that long white bed, where the man and woman took turns with his brother, while Daniel could only watch, aching for some release, or his turn upon the mattress, and forced to look upon the Perrault hung above the headboard. The canvas was enormous, and almost its entire surface had been painted the same charcoal grey. There was a figure at the center, which had looked to Daniel like a satyr, perhaps, and he thought, possibly, that the satyr was crouched beneath a tree, but it was hard to tell, as the painter’s style strayed to and fro between impressionism and the abstract.

  And it was after his twin’s second orgasm, once the man and woman had each fucked him repeatedly and with a ferocity that had seemed to match, somehow, the murky threat of that grey painting above them, that the woman had produced a small syringe. Daniel’s brother was lying on his belly, wrapped snug in the ivory folds of those cum-soaked sheets, laughing at some scrap of profanity the man had whispered in his ear. Later, all the misdirection would be clear, but, in that moment, Daniel only felt his own neglected desire, the distracting, deafening throb of his erection. The woman jabbed the needle into his brother’s left thigh, and the convulsions began within only a few seconds. It was neither a pretty nor a painless death, though it was, at least, relatively quick. Indeed, his twin was dead before Daniel had fully begun to comprehend what he was seeing. He could not scream or cry out for mercy or help—the ball gag saw to that—and had to make do with muffled howls and curses. And when his brother’s paroxysms ceased, Daniel shut his eyes tightly, that lie would not have to watch what the man and woman did to the corpse.

  And then he must have passed out, succumbing to the combined effects of shock and fury, alcohol and the tab of MDMA, because there were dreams. He stood alone in a charcoal pasture beneath the boughs of a charcoal tree, and the satyr played its pipes for Daniel and told a story of the beautiful nymph he had once loved, but who had spurned its love, and so the satyr had torn her to pieces and scattered the remains across this same charcoal field. The satyr offered to take him as its eromenos, and one question lingered on Daniel’s lips, too fearsome to be spoken—And what if I should decline?

  And sometime later, after sunrise, he awoke hung-ewer on a park bench, thoughtfully bundled up in a white chinchilla coat. Daniel discovered a typed letter in the left-hand pocked of the coat, folded and sealed inside a white envelope, written in ink from a crimson typewriter ribbon explaining, quite convincingly, how any attempt to prove the man and woman’s culpability in the death of his brother would not only prove futile, but would surely be met with the occasion of his own death. Daniel sat there for more than an hour, surrounded by the winter and the city, the bleak landscape of leafless branches and black ice and newly fallen snow, manhole covers steaming on the street and the exhaust of all the yellow taxis rushing by. For a time, he held out hope that he was dreaming still, and the satyr would appear, in due course, to kindly lead him back through the charcoal painting to the bedroom where his brother still lived. He looked for hoof prints in the snow, and sniffed the air for its musky, goatish scent. In the end, he gave up and hailed one of the taxis, which drove him to Penn Station, where he took a train out of the city. It was almost dark by the time Daniel found his way home again, and this, then, is what we shall consider a more suitable beginning to the tale.

  Other beginnings, all equally suitable and equally legitimate as starting points, might be detailed here, but the catalog would quickly grow tiresome, and the reader might lose interest and wander away. And so, regrettably, this affair must be relayed with discretion. There are some who say that one of the sacred duties of the storyteller is to divide reality, history, fallacy, myth, fiction, fact, and parable into discrete and easily processed units, sparing the ear and eye and mind all manner of indigestion. You may choose the garden, or you may choose the party, or you may imagine those earlier beginnings for yourselves.

  3.

  Scotch-taped to one wall of Daniel’s cluttered greenhouse workshop is a page torn from a 1932 edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), pulled fro
m the portion of that voluminous and obsessively subdivided manuscript titled “Bad Diet a cause. Quality of Meats.” A single sentence has been marked over with a neon-yellow highlighter, and it reads, “Mithridates by often use, which Pliny wonders at, was able to drink poison; and a maid, as Curtius records, sent to Alexander from King Porus, was brought up with poison from her infancy.” (The First Partition, Section 2, Member 2, Subsection L). Daniel chanced across the passage almost a year after his brother’s death, and, to quote Charles Darwin, “... from so simple a beginning...” was born Daniel’s scheme. In that single sentence from a book published the better part of four centuries ago, he found direction, and so began the gathering together of his fatal garden and menagerie, not to mention a vast cabinet of deleterious minerals, elements, chemical compounds, and microbes. Daniel soon discovered that this theme of incrementally tainted women delivered as a sort of passively assassinous gift could be traced back to the early Middle Ages and the Purnanas or Suhrit-Sammitas, said, by the faithful, to have been compiled by Vyasa Rishi, the Krishna Dvaipayana,at the close of the Hindu Dvapara Yuga.

  No matter the source, it is the fact of the inspiration here that matters, those few words that set Daniel on this path, that gave him some hope, however expensive it might prove, of avenging the murder of his brother. And, too, there is the private detective retained to locate, identify, and keep tabs on the couple in Manhattan. By now, Daniel has five thick files on them, exacting profiles of their habits and history, and he has cause to believe his twin was not their first or their last victim. The detective, who has been paid, and paid well, to maintain the utmost discretion and secrecy, has linked them to disappearances of young men and women from Virginia to Massachusetts, Richmond to Boston, over a period of nine years. There appears to have been two victims since the death of Daniel’s brother. But he has not allowed these facts to rush him towards the pair’s reckoning, and he will feel no guilt for not having saved the lost he never knew. His twin is burden enough, and he will take on no more. Still, there is a map taped to the wall alongside the page from The Anatomy of Melancholy, and there are pins with colored heads to mark each murder committed by the two. They are not his responsibility, all those other deaths, but they are a useful reminder.