by John Everson
THE BEGINNING WAS THE END
The beginning was…
The end.
Angel spit in my face. Holy water sizzled on my skin, ice to flame. I didn’t brush it away. I lived for the pain she gave.
“Don’t you get it?” she screamed. The blue of her frenzied eyes was chilling. “We have nothing in common. Nothing! We never did. All we do is hurt each other. I won’t listen to you tear me down for doing the right thing anymore.”
“And I won’t listen to you calling me a liar, a demon and an asshole,” I whispered. I never raised my voice at her, even in anger. If I let those fires loose…who knew what hell a creature from heaven could withstand?
“But you are,” she insisted.
“Come here,” I soothed, arms outstretched to enfold her. She batted me away with wings of gossamer white.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “Ever again.”
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” I challenged. “It’s not seemly for a child of grace to spit and screech so. You might find your privilege in the City of Light revoked.”
“I’m only like this when I’m around you. Can’t you see? You do this to me. You turn me into this, this…witch!”
“If I’m not mistaken, we are all responsible for our own actions.”
“You bring out the worst in me.”
“Opposites attract.”
“Well you repel me.”
I bent forward to kiss those pale pink cupid lips and felt a knee in my groin.
“I warned you,” she said, and slapped a creamy palm across my face. I felt her cottony flesh catch and scrape against the blackened barbs of my stubble. I hadn’t shaved today.
“I love you,” I countered.
“You are incapable of love.”
Angel turned and fled. Probably to her mother’s, the Saint of all Solace. No matter what good deeds that mother’s tongue supposedly suggested, I found her an intolerable gossip.
««—»»
It had all come down to the simplest truth. No creature of gentle heart and heavenly virtue should dally with a beast of blackened lust and perverse pursuits. She knew that going in, and so did I. But when I’d first met Angel, she was just a lonely spirit, yearning for something to brighten her nights and darken her days. Life in the City of Light was too constant for her, too predictable. She relished the shadows I cast on her path and the flames of temptation I wore like a robe. She adored me. She yearned to strip my temptations from me and explore my evil. She probably thought she could save me. A lot of City of Light girls are like that—always wanting to redeem someone.
My excuse? Lust. Of course. And something more. There was a particular sweetness in her, a softness, a beauty that I’d never seen in the hard girls of the Dark Carnival, where the mirrors of seduction were ever-present but the curve of a true heart could never be seen. The day that I slipped through the caverns of the Carnival and recklessly stole across the forbidden ash of the Grey Lands, I received my just punishment.
She was bathing, alone, in a crystal brook. I crept through the brush unseen, and spied on her from behind a rock. Her beauty took my breath away, and a strange pain bloomed within my chest. I grinned and considered all the ways that I could soil that perfect skin. I imagined her chained in a basement warehouse, breasts flogged bloody, flanks gored by the rabid teeth of a thousand starving rats. I smiled at the image of her downy wings tarred with pitch, and her thin legs spread in a spider’s crooked stance, pinned to a board by my hooks of iron. In my mind I hung her from rafters on meathooks and drank her blood like rain, my mouth open wide below her thrashing feet.
But then another image came, one more horrible than any that went before. In this vision there was no blood, and no bonds. I saw my head lying cradled in the cushion of her glowing lap. I felt her silken hands caressing the burnt furrow of my brow. I tasted the honey of her kiss smoothing and filling the bitter chap of my lips.
I laughed out loud at the foolishness of this dream and she heard. My naked Angel leapt from the water, darting into the woods beyond. Dazzling starbursts swirled to pop like soap bubbles on the still water in her wake.
It was the last day of my corruption. And her innocence.
The middle was…
The Between.
I won’t bore you with the details of our dysfunctional courtship. Of how each day I braved the Between, the forbidden limbo of The Grey Lands, to cross over to her. Of how she failed to appreciate the purity and ingenuity of my gift of three crucified, gutted virgins (one in each color—blond, brunette and redhead!) or of how she nearly poisoned me with her offering of a rosary made from the ivory-bone beads of St. Theresa and incense cultured from the leaves of a Golgotha olive tree on our one-month anniversary. She said it was symbolic, but it took me a week to wipe the blinding sheen of purity from my eyes. That was a week I almost didn’t survive, since you need your darkest vision to survive in the fetid bowels of the Dark Carnival.
Somehow, our love overcame these and other missteps. We leapt together past the boundaries of good, evil and propriety to merge with force and fury, my foul heat offset by the chill of her holiness.
Oh yes. We came together. We fucked wilder than demons or angels. And when she came, the air grew so thick with the heavenly musk of lavender that my own foul carrion scent was expunged. When we coupled, it seemed as if the universe imploded and exploded at the same time, as the pain and pleasure of the forbidden shot through our bodies in equal measures of exquisite excess. We drank in each other’s barred beauty and survived to suck down more. We should have been thrown out of both hell and heaven, but somehow, our liaison struck the perfect balance, and neither God nor Devil troubled us.
And then the balance shifted.
Entropy is the law of all life, and it proceeds much the same in afterlife. Or to quote the lyrics of lost rock star P. Rockrohr, “Nothing stays forever, anymore.”
The seven deadlies somehow came to play on our page in Scheherazade’s stories.
One night as Angel’s grace-embued sweat poisoned, burned and evaporated from the hellish furnace of my chest, she stared at me, blue eyes piercing as nails, and said “You fuck devils when you go home, don’t you?”
I was a little taken aback. I mean, I had never suggested to her that while I was gone to the Dark Carnival, she was swallowing the oily, holy crism of the cocks of angels, did I? Never did I even consider that she might be taking it up the pristine ass from the prong of a snow-white heavenly sheep!
But once heaven’s eye or hell’s middle finger is trained on a quandary, there is no looking back until it’s solved. Or dissolved.
I laughed at her probe, showing yellowed, pointed, deathly teeth. The teeth that had fed on the vile entrails of the lost, and the dead. Dangerous teeth that had touched her teats but tenderly.
“What do you take me for, Angel?” I begged. “I’ve given myself to you. Isn’t that enough?”
“I will not be soiled by the prod of a devil who’s carrying the oil of a hell-whore on his scepter.” She had a way of renaming the anatomy so that it sounded more exalted. Cock would have suited me fine. But I joined in the act.
“And I suppose you haven’t been spreading the chapel wide for the flock of the holy shepherd to graze upon.”
Her cupid lips drooped. “You know I’ve always been true to you, though I shouldn’t be.”
I laughed. “How could an Angel be anything but true? Unless, of course, she was fucking a devil?”
That earned me a slap that burned for hours.
And so the descent into our own private maelstrom began.
While in the past she had ignored my habit of hanging stray angels on coat hooks in her utility room to bleed poisonous holy salve from their wounds (the blood of an angel was worth a million bribes in hell), now she insisted that I put away my toys before they were fully fruited. She claimed the stench was murdering her meditations.
And I, for my part, took stricter notice
of the relics and various translations of the Bible that seemed suddenly to multiply throughout her house. And in taking such notice, I shat upon them.
Uncouth, I know. But even devils have their pride to uphold…or unload.
She answered by spiking my beer with the mead of St. Michael. I nearly choked to death on my first honeyed draught. “Bitch!” I screamed, my throat hissing with holy smoke. The icy broken glass tinkle of laughter shattered from above.
“You should take more care with what you put in your mouth,” she warned.
After that, before I sucked them, I rubbed down her breasts with the effluence of an Etruscan whore I knew from the Carnival. Better safe than sorry. Angel shivered at the pollution, but her distaste still turned to ecstasy when I put my fevered lips to her.
Until the final line was drawn.
“Come to the Dark Carnival with me,” I said. She was frying a snow white fish in the balm of etheria. Angel looked at me with eyes wide and frozen blue, and simply said, “No.”
“Come with me to see where my strength lies,” I begged once more, and she only shrugged.
“Will you step with me into the light of the City?” she said. “Will you kiss the brows of refugees and coddle the concerns of the just with no thought for yourself?”
I admitted that I could not.
She flipped the fish in the invisible grace of its oily etheria.
“Then I cannot accompany you either.”
And so the division was stated.
From there, it only grew combative.
She lined my shorts with the dust of chaste and dowdy Dominican nuns. And I filled her bathtub with the curdled blood of suicidal goth girls.
Our skins prickled at the thought of each other.
No more did our lovemaking bring ecstasy. Now we only brought each other damnation and salvation…the opposite of whatever the other wished.
Her loins joined to mine like the iceberg to the Titanic…without frenzy or favor, just relentlessness…she dragged me down to desperation, just as I burned her saintliness to a hairs-breadth of damnation.
««—»»
I was walking though the barrier of the grey lands, when the messenger found me.
“Devil,” she said, prostrating herself on bloody palms and wounded knees before me.
“Rise,” I instructed, and enjoyed the strangely rolling arc of her eyes, and the wrinkled crimson signature of her broken jaw. Her head and shoulder twitched every few seconds in a catatonic rhythm.
“If you visit the heaven whore again,” she said, “you will live in the wastelands of loss forever.” She hiccoughed, and a stream of blackened blood spattered the ground at my feet.
“And you are?”
“I am Benevi, whore of the last dick-tator.”
“Fuck him,” I suggested, and stepped away.
“Wait,” she begged, clutching at my bony heels. But I did not stay.
I knew, nevertheless, that my time with Angel was almost up. We were at war, hell was upon me for my indiscretion, and the hole in my chest could not widen much farther. Heaven and hell should only come so close.
««—»»
“I bring you the heart of a virgin,” I announced amid the pristine coral white of her bedchamber. In my hand, dripping crimson blood, I did, indeed, hold the naked organ of an earthly innocent.
Angel fainted.
I held the heart above her mouth and squeezed, until the blood dripped down her lips and eyes and stained the sheets like faded lipstick.
“Drink, my darling,” I begged.
Instead, she spit.
“Bastard,” she said. “Who was she?”
“You would have preferred a him?” I asked.
“I would have preferred your balls in a blender!”
I had no response to that.
“I sacrificed her for your honor,” I explained.
“And I piss in your mouth for her memorial,” she returned.
An arc of dismissal did indeed emanate from the area where, formerly, we had coupled. She peed steaming holy water in my face. Hardly heavenly.
I grabbed her around the neck and squeezed with intent, but she only grinned purity, and kneed me in the groin.
“You should control your temper,” I suggested.
“You should control your deceit,” she returned.
“You ignorant bitch,” I screamed.
I’m sure the scream was the key. For the first time in our relationship, my damnable anger overtook me and fire literally poured from my mouth to limn and blacken the beautifully angelic face of my love. Her scowl was rimmed in the light of a puritan moon. She didn’t take it well.
She never even touched the ravage my fury had made of her face. It would rebuild itself in eternity. “Damn you to hell,” she cried at last.
“Too late.”
“Ahhhh!” she moaned, frustrated beyond words. With five heavenly nails she gouged hard at the well-traveled scars of my face. And with holy spit she burned the light from my eyes.
“I hate you!” she proclaimed.
“I love you!” I returned.
We were both wrong.
No creature from heaven can feel in the right way for a creature of hell, and vice versa. God and Satan must have laughed in tandem. Whatever we felt, it was anathema. We were doomed by our attachment.
I threw her to the ground and cackled. Imagine the worst horror movie villain giving a chilling warning of esoteric humor. It was ghastly. Frightening. Subversively sublime.
She seemed nonplussed.
But I kicked her in the head repeatedly until her iceberg eyes fluttered back and closed.
Angels should never fight with demons. We’re so, so much more desperate.
I left my Angel’s home at the outer edge of the City of Light and fled, as if a criminal, to the Grey Lands. Not that I had to worry…regardless of who succumbed in this round of violence, we were both eternal.
I spent many hours there, walking in desperation…wondering if I had crossed, not the line, but the very border of existence.
But a demon can never escape the bounds of his prison, and so I was only punished more for my transgression; not by Satan, but by my Angel’s own desperate deeds. Desperation is our calling card in the Dark Carnival. We one-up each other with every desolate day.
I never wished to take her heaven from her. I envied her that salvation.
After I left her in her tomb of light, I wandered the twilight of the Grey, and kicked in the heads of those who came in my path. They came to me in obeisance, since my aura still reeked of the scent of salvation of the City of Light, and as they kneeled before me, begging my aid, I put a razor-edged boot to their foreheads and grinned like a sickly clown. “Zombo to you,” I spat.
Their souls fled to the next level of damnation as ethereal brain matter spattered the ashes of the ground.
But my destructive glee was short-lived. Our fight had driven Angel to another form of destruction. Self.
On the horizon, I spied a shooting star in the deep blue of night. It’s always night in the Grey Lands. The heavens spat out a star, and it fell. It fell angrily, sputtering purple and white light in a whirl. I hurried forward, eager to see the pit of its death.
My feet pummeled the earth in pursuit, but I could not beat its path to the lost land of the borderland. By the time I arrived at its impact zone, it had already arisen.
It was a she.
Fire still bled from her hair and limbs, but I knew without a doubt whose soul had fallen from heaven.
Her white hair still flared a taunting challenge, and her lips puckered red at my gaze. Her once beautiful snowy wings were ruined; two blackened, spiny limbs were all that remained. My Angel shook her head once, twice, and then her ivory legs pumped hard and she ran, ran, ran away from me to hide deep in the caverns of the Grey Lands. But no matter how fast she ran, I knew that she could never outrace my love. And at the same time, I knew that my love could never offer her the solace of heav
en.
I hurried to meet her burning soul.
The end was…
The beginning.
— | — | —
LETTING GO
She was newly born; her face gave it away. The shadows of death hadn’t marked her yet. The smudgepot glow of the stagelight flickered bloodily on lily pure cheeks as she gaped, aghast at the spectacle. I moved to intercept before some other eater caught the scent of her naiveté. She was angelfood. Pure vanilla-spun sugar.
“Just another Saturday night,” I said, slipping an arm wreathed in the ink of demons and skulls around her shoulders. She didn’t shrug me away, as I’d expected. I chalked her acceptance down to shock, not invitation.
“I don’t understand,” she said. Her voice was a whisper of sadness. The lovers before us mortified her. I didn’t know how she had ended up here. Maybe she was reborn right there, in that spot, and opened her eyes to see the depraved sex show as the first vision in her new home; it happens. Regardless, she remained utterly disconnected.
Angelfood indeed. Innocent and clueless.
“It’s just sex.” I squeezed her bird-thin shoulders. I hesitated in pulling her closer, worried I would snap her in half unintentionally. Death was like that. A land of unintended consequences.
“But they’re…they’re…”
“Bloody?”
She nodded, unable to verbalize the horror that coupled in front of us as the entertainment for an audience of shadowed thousands all around.
On the stage, a man and a woman did, indeed, rut without regard to the spectators. But unlike an underground sex show hidden just off the Times Square police beat, this couple were not, in any way, pretty to see. The woman was thick in the waist and long of burnished bronze hair. It was impossible to tell her age, not that age meant anything here anyway. But if she had wrinkles or grey hair or sagging breasts…it was all moot now. The scroll of her life had been skinned off, leaving only her true self. A skein of veins and slippery muscle leavening shape atop ligaments and bone.
