Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  But Renaud sent them away, each in the soft mornings, richer only by a few coins. He then added their number to his gentleman’s fable of a thousand and one Arabian nights. He wooed the next as if he were Omar Khayyam, dressed in cashmere and bearing chocolates.

  And then he found the Bedouin Bahloul. The young man’s wild hair was like the mane of a Sultan’s horse, coins glittering about his forehead, mad as the wandering wind. Renaud beheld his vagabond smile of random gypsy genius, nomadically noble and vulgar. He read there a catalogue of date palm honeymoons beside oasis dreamwater wells. He presented the youth with a harlequin opal and a single perfumed amaranth.

  “If we clasp the stone between us, breast to breast, our souls will merge in its fire,” Renaud told him with a chivalrous flourish.

  Bahloul asked slyly, “But the amaranth is the flower of love-lies-bleeding, is it not?”

  “I was here in a former existence. I was a king in the medieval desert battles of faith,” he said to impress the boy with a sense of destiny.

  “Oh?” Bahloul arched an exquisite eyebrow. “Were you Richard or Saladin?”

  Renaud grinned, not giving a lover’s answer. So Bahloul asked, “If you were a king, how is it that you—a Frenchman—survived the revolution?”

  Again Renaud didn’t answer. He sang his song of love and the youth agreed to go with him.

  Bahloul seduced Renaud with Egypt’s dance. He crept like a harem slave to the Frenchman on his knees. He licked the mihrabs that niched in the scarred motifs of Renaud’s flesh. Bahloul circumcised him with his practiced nails. He showed Renaid his shifting Saracen duality in the nightingales of his Persian garden and in the ravens of bloody jihad, until Renaud understood why the prophets always emerged wise from the wastelands.

  And then Bahloul stabbed Renaud with a knife held concealed in his sirocco hair. The boy leaped up, naked, and began to smash open the cabinet, crying, “Now will I have the wealth of the djinn, every Martian ruby and triolet tourmaline. Amethysts and chrysoprase will I wear with indigo organdy and purple velvets!”

  The hinges broke and the swirled mahogany splintered. The faces in its dark grain wailed. The doors cracked apart with a melancholy creaking as Bahloul opened his arms to be showered with a caliph’s ransom.

  But all that fell into his arms were heads, jade of cheek and cloudy of filmed moonstone eye. Round and rolling across the sumptuous carpets. Quartzite teeth bared from their final screams. They embraced Bahloul as they tumbled unhindered, as if to thank him for their release.

  Through the opened was the Rue Saint-Honore, wagons full of French royalty being driven into a mob that pressed in jackal juggernaut. The grim tricoteuses knitted by the scaffold in the square near the Tuileries Gardens. The guillotine could be seen flashing, heard slicing down with a jolting steel resonance.

  Beyond—or superimposed till the images blurred at the edges—were the gilded domes of mosques, the bleached stone of arabesque towers. A blood red dust rose into the air beneath both a merciless desert sun and a weeping moon. Men in armor clanked through the streets, crosses emblazoned on their shields. They rampaged, hacking at every man, woman, and child within the conquered walls.

  The heads continued to roll from the open cabinet, by dozens, hundreds, thousands.

  “My treasure!” Renaud cried out, ignoring his wound to stand and stagger toward the open armoire. Grisly heads—some in varying stages of decomposition, others as fresh as the moment they were chopped off (even if centuries before)—spun across the carpets and silks on the floor. He bent, trying to stop them, to turn them back the other direction. He snatched one and tucked it under his arm, dropping it to grab at another. “No! You’ve spilled them out. It’s taken me years to collect them. Years!”

  The last utterance of this word of time froze Bahloul’s blood. The boy looked with horror into the wardrobe, at the scenes of carnage which telescoped out. The sea of red-capped Frenchman was whirling toward the entrance; the blood-thirsty crusaders swung two-handed swords over their heads as they shrieked prayers in broken Latin, also turning toward the opening in the armoire.

  Bahloul jumped forward, hurling the chairs and tables of the room at it. He pulled a tall, carved sesham wood screen across the floor to cover it. He pulled another screen of ebony and gilt to press against the first one.

  Nothing came out. No more heads. No murderous knights or rioters, no terrors from Antioch or Paris.

  Renaud sat on the floor amid the numerous heads that had rolled out, putting this one and that one in his lap, combing the gory hair with his fingers. His own wound was deep in the shoulder but wasn’t mortal.

  Bahloul stooped to pull off ruby earrings from a set of ears, sitting just above the chop mark, all the while staring at the armoire behind him. His eyes bulged. Then he fled the room.

  He told what he had seen and people crept to listen at the walls. They heard the Frenchman as he sobbed and murmured to himself. They heard sounds as the screens were pulled away, scraping the floor, and then fitted across the broken front of the cabinet again and again. Later they heard hammering.

  Three nights later Bahloul lay curled against the lap of his lover, Mosailama. The hairy Syrian worked as a porter and procuror for European travelers.

  “You know that strange Frenchman has left the country,” Mosailama told the youth as he caressed the boy’s supple thighs. “I myself arranged for the transport of his bags, embroidered with fleur-de-lis, and an enormous crate holding a tall piece of furniture.”

  “No! Did he return to France? They say Napoleon has escaped the island they put him on, and there is to be a battle with England,” Bahloul said, coming briefly out of his reverie. The coins on his forehead jangled. He sweated sweetly through the attar that oiled his body.

  “He did not,” Mosailama replied. “He had read an article on the British in India, detailing the ancient violence the English have encountered as they conquer the sub-continent. The Frenchman got a farway look on his face. I could not tell if it was terror or rapture, and he said, ‘Soon there will be a great mutiny there. It will be monstrous.’ He turned to me and whispered (or perhaps it was not to me at all—but to the dry wind)—he whispered, “Oh, ye Hindu boys of tamarind arms, painted with ginger, bracelets of silver on your ankles, dancing, offering bloodless passage to nirvana and twisting into all the obscene riddles of love. I smell the black soot incense of your loins and the sacred white milk you spill.’ Then he boarded a ship at Latakia and sailed for Calcutta.”

  | — | — |

  THE FAMILY OF DEATH

  In the past her shrine might have materialized on All-Hallows night in a grove of silver maples or at the black X of a crossroads or in a temple of tumbled stones. Nowadays it manifested in an alley beyond view of the traffic on the streets. The queen appeared from the mesh of shadows, naked in a ray of moonlight that managed to filter through the city smog—any city, all cities.

  And no sooner was she present than her followers began to arrive. They weren’t the members of any particular religion. They were merely the faithful of the dead. They didn’t know they would be called to worship her this October evening. They just showed up, having been drawn from their various dark corners across the miles, confused until they glimpsed the greening of her narrow flesh, then bowed down to her with the reverence which necessarily accompanied enlightenment.

  The first man stepped into the alley across a pile of garbage. There she was, oh, wide mouth voluptuous as a rictus, the only thing not spare about her.

  “Trick or treat,” he said as if uttering a novena he’d newly learned.

  “A treat for you,” the queen replied.

  She reached into one of the sacks of her flaccid breasts and pulled out a pinch of red dust. Holding it up before those stretched-back lips, she drew up a wormwood breath and blew it at him.

  He closed his eyes as he swayed on his feet. His body changed in a ripple, costumed with her intent. He became whatever murdering monster was in vogu
e at the moment. He was wrapped in a bloody haute couture, his savage teeth the color of stolen wine. Rejoicing, he left to carve the queen’s praises across the night.

  The second man entered from the opposite end of the alley, stumbling across the gray streak of a squalling cat. He tripped over the feline and fell to land at the queen’s hoary feet. Staring up, he could see her wondrous thatch of worms, the sharp outline of the bones of her wasted hips.

  “Trick or treat,” he whispered, embarrassed by his own clumsiness and appalled by her beauty.

  “For you a trick,” she answered.

  She reached into the sack of the other breast and brought out a bit of white mold. She rubbed it between her fingers until it crumbled, floating down to his upturned face.

  He inhaled it, shivering with ecstasy. His body altered, weakening by painful inches, bruising and splitting with wounds. He became the posturing victim in style for the times, his hands up in supplication, his eyes streaming the tears of grateful begging.

  She slid one of her feet close to him so he could suck the grave soil from her toes, and afterward—as he gagged on the foulness—she kicked him in the face. He howled like a dog as she lifted him up, flinging him the length of the alley. His arms were yanked upward by her magic, both shoulders dislocating with a snap. His wrists were somehow together and bound with sinew from the cat he’d tripped over, suspending him from a lamppost. He swung there, whimpering, as a third person entered the alley.

  This was a woman in a filmy dress. Perhaps she’d left a Halloween party to follow her instincts here. Maybe her silky costume was intended to be that of a fairy princess, or maybe it was meant to represent some virgin sacrifice. Her long, pale hair lifted in the night wind like the smoke from a bonfire.

  “Trick or treat,” the woman murmured, lips parting as she bowed before this goddess of Samhain.

  “Both for you,” said the gaunt queen as she strode forward and allowed the woman to kiss the oblivion maw between her skeletal thighs.

  Immediately the woman’s own body began to corrupt. Her blond hair fell out by handfuls to blow away like the ether strands of lost spirits. Her firm youth sagged, the skin crackling, the fat vanishing like last year’s summer. The queen grew stronger, the cadaverous hollows of her own shape filling with splendor.

  “I give you a goddess’s discarded self,” the queen said. “It is a great honor to bear my ruin.”

  The fourth was approaching the alley where the lovely new queen stood. This next was little more than a tall, ebon ripple. The shadow affixed itself to the victim twitching on the lamppost. She could hear the shattered man’s helpless mumbles of “thank you, thank you” fading away to an empty husk’s rattle.

  The shadow took on substance and was the king of death, Halloween-whole and handsome. She ran to him and they joined. Her full, pumpkin-hard breasts flattened against the tomb marble of his chest, her hips grinding against the grotesque nightmare of his loins: the dusky point of true crossroads. This one evening they could rise from their burial to be lovers again. The maiden and the spring lord of seeds came together to create the fertility of summer, just as these two merged in autumn to begin winter. This was their riot and celebration as the dead walked in a festival of restless sleep.

  There was a rustle at one end of the alley, a slimy scrape of something loosely made trying to crawl. The corpses of the cat and the victim twisting under his ligature made noises of gas and the slurp of rot. The air grew colder as the king and queen halted in mid-thrust. They stared at each other in horror, knowing that this moment of fresh skin and passion was over, always too soon.

  Terrified, she said to her husband, “Oh, no…here comes baby.”

  | — | — |

  THE SPIRIT WOLVES

  Five years ago when Milo was only thirteen he cut his mother’s old bear rug into strips and then sewed these pieces to his flesh. It had taken the better part of one night of suppressing his cries of pain as he threaded the needle time and again with thick woolen thread and pushed it through in loop after loop to secure the fur to his body. It had become quite slippery with his blood but this only served to give it and him a magical sheen when he looked into the mirror afterward.

  I have entered the pelt of an animal.

  I have become the beast.

  Then he ran away to join Fatima’s Freak Tent outside the city limits. All the comely mutant ladies welcomed him, clucking and tittering with a singsong babble of delight. They touched him with their stumps and flippers, ran their bearded cheeks across his beardless ones, held fast his gasping face between their breasts that were either skeletal or mammoth mounds of perfumed fat. They cooed over Milo’s ruined flesh and counterfeit hide, crawling around him on all fours, proclaiming,

  “You are the king of the wolves!”

  Then his mother came to drive him home before her with a stick, haranguing him every mile of the way.

  If only she’d beaten him with her own hands, scratched at him until he bled. But she never touched him.

  Had she ever touched him? Milo couldn’t remember the feel of her hands ever. She pushed food at him, had even pushed the bottle toward him when he was a baby. Had left him, naked for days at a time, in his own excrement, before finally hosing him down.

  But she must have touched him at some time. To teach him to walk, to take care of himself so that she wouldn’t have to make contact. He didn’t remember.

  Had he wanted to be an animal? He’d seen the tantalizing women of Fatima’s and he needed to be touched. He had always been too perfect. Milo wasn’t only a handsome boy, he was a flawless beauty. It might have made him popular in his exquisiteness if it hadn’t been such a dark beauty, so keenly edged that he seemed to have been carved from dark bone. And it would likely have helped his cause if he’d been willing to speak to people. But Milo mostly growled at folks, deep within his velvet throat like a beast. Most people around probably didn’t know he could talk. And he never talked to his mother. What would he say if he did? Touch me! Hold me? Use your fists and teeth until I am raw with you.

  His mother hissed, “Devil child.”

  She’d left him on a dozen different doorsteps when he was an infant but the sheriff had always made her claim him. Why hadn’t she left him at Fatima’s then where he’d been so immediately accepted—even if he’d had to alter himself to do so? Was it because she’d become accustomed to brutalizing him from a distance? Had this granted her an outlet and an excuse for the ruin her own life had become?

  Milo sat cross-legged before the mirror, butt naked on the cold floor, watching as his punctured skin slowly healed without scarring. No, he was too gorgeous for the holes to stay cut into his flesh. He wished the marks had remained, that he was pocked forever, for perfection marked him as being apart from all else. It made him furious, sitting there scratching himself, raking the elegant half-moons of his nails over his arms and face, desperate for touch, for sensation. Sometimes the need to be handled grew so frantic that mauling became a parody of contact. He dreamed of being torn apart by animals and that had to be a symbol of closeness burned in effigy. He healed, every time. The king of the wolves slunk ignominiously from Milo’s sad life.

  Fatima’s special ladies turned away from him without recognizing him at all when his Uncle Rabe treated him to the carnival a few months later. They paraded their luscious deformities on the simple, ramshackle stage, shaking jelly mounds of flab or being wheeled on geek carts or doing perverse double-jointed calisthenics as they stared blankly into space. Smiles were frozen on their faces, refusing to acknowledge his presence at the foot of the stage, pleading up at them, craving a grope of their voluptuousness, wishing for any tidbit they might deign to grant this miserable, lonely boy.

  Could it be that they had known who he was but realized that he wasn’t one of them after all? He wanted to reassure them that he hadn’t been laughing at them. It hadn’t been a charade.

  “I wasn’t mocking you, Lizard Lady,” he whispered as the
pucker-fleshed damsel wriggled by. “I love you. I only want to stroke and be absorbed by your travesty.”

  She didn’t look his way but did seem to slow down as she slithered past him in the procession.

  “You say something, Milo?” Rabe asked in surprise. He’d never heard the kid speak before.

  Milo growled a response, felt it itch in his throat.

  Two years ago on Milo’s sixteenth birthday he went to Caine’s Tattoo Parlour and had himself covered with teeth. There were trenchant wolf sabers and yellow canine needles, bloody fangs, gleaming feral thorns, bared in snarling grimaces and in wide-open attack. His whole body became a dangerous mouth.

  “Look like yer bein’ et alive,” his mother scoffed as she spat.

  Grrrrrrrrrrroooowwwwwwwwwwlllllllllllll, he replied.

  Was he being eaten or was it protective camouflage?

  I enter the jaws of death.

  I become the jaws of death.

  Was to enter them the same as being?

  Milo began to lift weights until his slender Adonis form put on coils of muscle, stretching the threatening shows of teeth into rictuses of animal agony, throes of creature passion. Biceps and triceps oiled and flexing, he bristled within his cage of fangs. He could feel the grazing by their rotted but powerful enamel against his skin. He would wake in the night straining against a dream of violence to find that some had broken the veneer of his flesh to leave Milo speckled in hot blood.

  “This is interesting,” he said to himself, smiling as he licked the blood off, reconsuming it. He turned his elbows back, his knees back as he’d seen Fatima’s ladies do. He cleaned his genitals as well as he could, shaking flecks of spittle from his lips. It was a dusky flavor, copper and salt like the bodies of the freak women.