Beneath Ceaseless Skies #147

by Tobler, E. Catherine

  “We did not—”

  Beast covers Beauty’s mouth with a thin hand. Beauty’s eyes meet Beast’s, and then we look at the man before us. He doesn’t look wary but drugged, like every other who comes to our tent; he is impossibly intrigued at the sight of us, wants to know what lies beneath our paint-stained silk. Wants to know how our breast curves and whether we are concave or convex in all the proper places. His mouth says either is fine, divine, sublime. Whenever anyone looks into our eyes, they fall through the brown and the gold and land in the black.

  “We did not.”

  These are the only words, lies though they are. Beauty carries a plea with every glance, but Beast cannot obey. Beast must suffer the gluttony

  There are but two hands participating in this destruction, weakened yet resolute; Beauty caves inward while Beast gorges. We need to stop; we cannot stop. We need to find another way; for us this is the only way. We need to stop. We cannot stop. Perhaps you need to stop, but you are not you; you are we, and we are starving.

  * * *

  We fold his shirt and set the holster atop it when we are done. The shirt is dried of sweat now, crisp, and the gun smells like oil. His skin pools on the ground like empty trousers. We lick the blood from each other, slow like we are waking up and the carnival stands around us in silence. In truth, there is a tremor of sound just beyond the canvas walls. So too there is a small shadow. An eye peering through a tattered hole. Our breaths catch.

  The old canvas tears easily beneath our hands, no talons required. Like the girl in her lace, we are unleashed from the tent’s confines, streaking after the small form who flees, who saw too much. Its small feet stutter across the ground behind the tents, but then we have scooped it—her—into our four-arm embrace and she shrieks. This terrible sound vanishes beneath our mouths—Beauty has no hunger but knows that this secret cannot escape. We swallow ragged mouthfuls till we choke, till blood streams our chins, splatters our chests. Everywhere, we are flushed red with terror and anger and so too lust. It is a momentary glimpse of a hunt, a life we perhaps lived before we were bound into this shared flesh.

  We destroy, consume, and cough it all back into the grass. When done, there is nothing left that resembles the young child who peered through tattered canvas. Perhaps five strips of skin splay as a hand might have, but no—no, we will not see that. There are only our shaking hands, fluttering wings, and a screech flying from our mouths. What have we done? Not what we must. Beauty pulls, claws, pummels, but cannot escape Beast.

  * * *

  In the warm dark, at last we rest. We do not touch; we lay as still as we are able, arms crossed over chests, wings carefully folded beneath. There is one breath, because one other is held. Lungs flutter still; body waits, poised. And then a hand across a belly. Breath comes once more. Hitched this time, unmatched. Fingers slide down shared belly, between shared legs, and curl. Soft, as if saying come on come on. Beauty wants to go, wants to come undone, and Beast refuses, but in the end, cannot. In the dark, there is a gasp. Ours, as it ever was.

  * * *

  We twist amid a forest made of shining metal willows today, hand-cut by Foster, who always smells of metal, of money and train tracks. Mister Hoyt has returned to watch us. He talks to us today as the crowd is thinner, less interested. His interest never wavers.

  It is a simple severing, he says, and he gestures as men of the world do (with prejudice, with agency, with insistence), to the juncture between us, where waist dips into waist. Mister Hoyt wants to break us as he might a cracker, easily in two as if we were never one. We have but two legs, we remind him, and he dismisses this with a wave. One of you shall have the legs, and one of you shall have a construct. This is disagreeable, we tell him, and he gestures to the valley between our legs, eyes narrowing as the silk which wraps us folds and bulges by turn. This is disagreeable, he tells us. This is us, we tell him, and we vanish behind trailing metal leaves to emerge a moment later, wings unfurled. He steps back, cowed. The small crowd murmurs in wonder. Can we fly, they always want to know.

  We tried in our distant youth to rocket our selves into the sky. We fell more than once. We tried from the ground, from a cliff, from the very tree tops. We bruised elbows, knees, wings. If I severed you, he tells us as we circle more trees, you could fly. But we would never be whole, we say, and our hands slide down our chests, across metal tree trunks and shining leaves, to make each shimmer. False tree, faux angel, he watches us and wants to break us. When he offers Jackson double for our time, Jackson does not deny him. We are beautiful and beastly and why shouldn’t he receive double every time?

  “Jabberwock,” Mister Hoyt calls us when he circles us within our tent, as if he can still figure out how we are made, how we have been joined into one imperfect flesh. The lines upon his face seem eased today, but are there in memory. “Hell needs its angels, too.”

  His hands are fine and strong and they slide over our arms, over the braided confines of our hair. His fingers dig into Beauty, to send ginger hair spilling. He doesn’t spill Beast, and later, when Hoyt is bent and broken upon the ground, Beast’s single braid that flips down a bare shoulder gives him a handhold; Hoyt clings, pulls, until his hand spasms and opens, until it goes limp as the rest of him.

  “Twas brillig,” we tell him.

  We gyre and gimble, streaking the canvas walls with blood in our haste.

  * * *

  Park officials notice when Mister Hoyt goes missing—Hoyt was one of their finest fleshcrafters, they say; he would not simply leave without word when he had done such quality work within the carnival park’s walls. The three-legged burlesque dancer; the bearded hippopotamus, the man whose every finger and toe tells the time in a different country, the miniature lady (aged twenty-seven) who can sleep in a teacup!

  They question Jackson, ask of his company of freaks. Jackson is all cool denial despite the warmth of the day. The air carries with it the scent of tar; Mister Hoyt’s new exhibit is close to finished, a place where people can ride boats through Hell itself and laugh at having escaped afterward. Hoyt wanted us to be a demon, the officials say; he came for us, they say, and now he cannot be found.

  Once they have gone, Jackson comes again. It was never a problem, Beast’s appetite, until we found our selves in this stagnant place, this world within a world, he says. Before, the train would come and go and our performances were fleeting, but now that we are the main attraction that people flock to, our beautifully strange ways are more closely observed. Jackson will never, he says, lose us, let us go, abandon us, leave us behind, kick us out, but here—

  he leans in, pulls our mouths close, and kisses us hard, his tongue forked between our lips

  —here, he says, we must be more careful. We cannot do what we naturally must. In his eyes, we see all things: we see the train stretching ever out, across this land and others we do not understand; we see Jackson alone and surrounded, we see him bent and broken and young and tall; we see him leaving us (oh he said he would never) and we see our selves flying. You can fly if you show patience, he tells us.

  Patience is not our gift.

  * * *

  We go to Mister Hoyt’s Hell Gate because we cannot resist knowing. We walk through the illuminated buildings and into the dense red glow that beckons from the park’s center. These bulbs have been coated in red paint and it throws everything, including us, into a strange glow. This building is larger than we guessed it would be, but then the underworld is large, vast. It must be, to hold all the dead. Its entrance is a yawning arch like a mouth, with a river instead of a tongue within; there are small boats to tightly hold two through Hell’s journey. The air smells heavily of pitch here and the lights sizzle with warmth in the night’s cool air.

  Within the mouth of the gate into the underworld, we see the child. The child who watched us through the tent’s canvas. Something lurches inside us, for this is impossible—the dead do not come back, no matter what stories say. Yet here stands this child, reassembled
with clumsy hands; her leftover skin shows the trespass of not needle and thread but the imprint of broad, strong fingers. Behind her looms Hoyt, the lady and the lawman, and countless others. These dead have been remade.

  Mister Hoyt does not wear his woolen suit tonight but stands before us naked, his skin a riot of lines that mark the passage of hands, blades, magic. Within this body, we see our selves: a being that is not necessarily male or female, a being that has been severed in two—the way he would have done us. A simple severing; we can hear the words echoed as his fine fingers stroke over the line that mars his hip, the line that once dipped into a separate waist. Behind him, we see that there had always been two. Here stands the other Mister Hoyt, the part he cut away, rising from hips and legs that have been constructed of abandoned skins, bones, lashed metal.

  Beauty wants so much to be good.

  Beast wants so much to be bad.

  We dig our feet into the ground, and from our center we pull—we pulled this way in our youth, trying in vain to part our selves. It is no easier nor more possible now. We are a solid flesh, a thing that cannot be parted no matter how we think we wish it. One would have legs and one would have a construct, and this is as disagreeable as the Hoyts who stand before us. We approach him and our feet print the ground; the grass has not grown because of the construction; there is soft dirt and stones and the debris of building this Hell Gate.

  The little girl fashioned from her leftover skin bolts at the sight of us. She screams and flees into Hell and the lady with her cigarette-burned thighs follows. The men regard us with even stares, but though dead their eyes have not lost the sheen of lust for whatever it is we are. Angel or demon, perhaps we are not a thing to be named, all desires being equal in the warm dark. Even so, they withdraw, leaving only the Hoyts before us. The mister we have known smiles, mouth slightly crooked from however he has been pressed back together. He extends his hands to us; they are strong still but coated in blood and tattered flesh, the signs of his trade. Sometimes, he says, a thing must be sacrificed so it may properly live.

  And who deems proper? we wonder. Mister Hoyt smiles again and lunges. Hell will have its angels—or its demons. Fine lines and distinctions, things we have never drawn but others always do. We turn our shoulder to him and our broad wings catch the brunt of his impact. Though these wings have never carried us into the sky, they are strong and living and bear him backward, toward the river which snakes from the mouth of Hell. His severed twin cannot move quickly at all; this Hoyt mewls pitifully as we stride past. This is what he would make of us? How he would separate and reduce?

  We are accustomed to working quickly, within the shadows. We are accustomed to silencing our prey so that none come running, and we are upon Mister Hoyt before he can cry out. But Hoyt has been remade by his own hands—be they his own or his twin’s. His crafted flesh is a thing we do not understand, for it comes apart beneath us. He seems many creatures in one, leftovers bound into a whole; they part, they scamper, they reassemble deeper along the river’s path. We pursue the gleaming trails in the red light, the twin’s mewling growing ever more distant.

  Deeper, the halls smell of sulfur and of the hot glow of the glass lights. Mister Hoyt sucks himself back together and flees deeper into Hell’s ever-branching caverns. He keeps to the illuminated river bank, the freshly-sealed channel below ready to be flooded by the Styx. It is here, when he turns to gauge our distance in pursuit, that his remade body staggers into a row of lighted bulbs.

  The glass shatters and there is a brilliant flare as filaments and shards rain into the fresh tar. There need be only a single spark—the tar comes to quick fiery life. The fire is faster than us or Hoyt; his newly crafted skin browns under the heat as though he is made of bread. The fire appreciates the lines which mark him, running like water to fill every empty valley.

  The burning Mister Hoyt lurches into our arms, begging. While he pulled himself apart moments before, the fire seems to be fusing his flesh into a solid lump, now incapable of escape. His tongue can barely form words before a snake of fire slides into the open hollow of his mouth. He tries to turn toward the river, to fling himself into its watery salvation but there is no water to be had, nor salvation in Hell. We hold him even as the flames stretch covetous fingers toward our wings. No, we tell him, and while Beauty sobs, Beast roars.

  Bit by bit, we feel our selves becoming ash. Small pieces of us lift into the inferno: skin, wings, a string of freckles once tongue-traced in the early morning quiet. Around us, the fire spreads along every fresh line of tar in the hollow of the river channels, deeper through the caverns like some far-ranging sea creature that will devour all in its path. These arms of flame surge through the entire park, to ignite buildings, trees, tents. We can hear the screams and they sound so distant, but they are our own as the flames wrap us the way silk once did. They curl around our shoulders, our waist, to lick the cleft between, and tell us that sometimes a thing must die before it can live.

  Beauty arches under the heat and tries to pull away. Beast crisps up, ephemeral dough, unable to pull with arms so withered. A simple severing, so simple, yet Beauty grasps a wasted hand that grasps in return, and pulls. Pulls us upward out of Hell and into the ashy air where we, as one trailing embers, fly.

  Copyright © 2014 E. Catherine Tobler

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including two stories set in this same circus world: "Artificial Nocturne" in BCS #126 and "Lady Marmalade" in BCS #98. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, will be in paper this August. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  HERE BE MONSTERS

  by Carrie Patel

  The flare gun is cold in my hands. I can’t shake the feeling that the little rocket inside is slowly dying.

  Each day I watch the horizon, and each night I watch the stars. They can tell you a lot if you know how to read them: where you are in the world, how long you’ve been there.

  When the abyssi are coming.

  The island I ended up on isn’t much different from the ocean that stranded me. Blue waves roll on one side and grassy dunes on the other.

  I built a shelter near the beach from some of the crates that washed ashore with me. It’s amazing how quickly the sun works. The outer portion of the hut is already bleached, and it’s been less than a month. Some of the crates are still filled with musket parts and mercury tablets, the freight we were carrying when the ship sank. Priceless stuff on the Ottoman front, but I’d kill for just a few more boxes of rations instead.

  At least thirst won’t kill me. There’s a freshwater spring half a mile inland.

  The remaining rations are in a box buried in the corner of my hut. I have seven left—I must have counted a dozen times before I hid them—but it helps not to look at them every day.

  Especially when I should be watching the horizon.

  You can recognize an abyssus by the shape of the water, but by then it’s too late. There’s a depression on the surface of the sea, as if something is sucking it down. Then the waters part, and whatever was unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle disappears beneath churning waves.

  Being on the water when an abyssus arrives is a mercy. Whole vessels are crushed with a swift, natural economy that no manmade war machine can match. It’s much worse to be caught on land. The beast will venture ashore at night in pursuit of fire and prey, but like any creature lured out of its habitat, it becomes desperate and unpredictable.

  That’s why I’ve been watching the stars. Just as abyssi suck the water from the ocean, they drain light from the night sky. The stars fade in their path, and by the time one is upon you, the whole sky is velvet black.

  The only thing worse than knowing an abyssus is co
ming is having no idea. The sky has been cloudy for six nights now.

  I watched the flat line of the sea again today. My clipper went down some fifty miles from Lisbon, so I’ve seen ships for the last three weeks, too far away to be anything more than ants crawling across the bar of the horizon, and definitely too far to guarantee they’d see my flare in broad daylight. Today was the first day there were none.

  With the seventh overcast night upon me, I’m beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be easiest to put the flare gun to my head.

  I’m fixated on this thought, and on the feel of the cool brass in my hands, and the sand between my toes, when I hear a shuffling noise. I lean toward the edge of the hut and hold my breath until I’m sure of it. There’s someone coming along the beach toward me.

  I peer into the darkness, but it’s useless. Between the breaking waves, though, the shuffling is getting louder. The stranger, whoever it is, is close. My grip tightens around the flare gun.

  Finally, I call into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

  The voice that returns to me is hoarse and cracked. “A fellow survivor, seeking shelter.” He doesn’t mention food. If it hadn’t been three days since I opened my last ration, I’d be more ashamed of that thought.

  He speaks again, and now he’s close enough for me to hear the ragged breaths between his words. “Mind if I join you? It’s your beach, after all.”

  If I hadn’t thought of it as my beach, it’s only because I’d thought of the entire island as mine. Still, what can I say? “Of course.”

  Suddenly, I want to see this stranger who will be sharing my shelter. I tuck the flare gun into my waistband and pull out my cap lighter. The lid slides away with a clink, and I hear the stranger tense.

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “The gift of fire.”

  “Don’t be stupid. It’s full dark,” he says between his teeth.