I searched the online databases for killers who matched the black-haired woman’s description, but I couldn’t find anyone like her.
“What did she say her name was?” my father asked.
“She didn’t.”
“You mean you didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“When are you going to meet her?”
“I don’t think I want to.”
I pressed my fingertips to my temples. Inside my skull I felt the pulse of my father’s curiosity. Or was it envy, that insistent throb behind his concern?
“Never break an appointment with a murderer who wants to confess. Go talk to her.”
My father, Pontius Pilate. He was pushing me towards the chasm of this murderer’s desire to explain herself, and he didn’t seem to care that I was about to fall. He usually hated to let me leave his castle. I was his Easter lily, his unsullied symbol of eternal life. Now he was urging me out into the night, to meet this seductress who claimed to be a murderer.
I finally gave in.
That night I dined alone, as usual. I couldn’t stop thinking about the satin clutch of the murderer’s lips, or the pressure of her breasts against mine. Her pebble-hard nipples had left two sore spots on my chest. Every few minutes I would touch one of those tender places, and the room around me would dissolve in a mist of desire. I could hardly swallow my food. When I tried to chew a bite of meat, the flesh tasted of cunt and Easter lilies.
I didn’t have anything to wear to a club. My own clothes were drab, penitential. I searched the castle’s guest rooms, looking for some sultry gown that a female visitor might have left behind. My father often hosted murderers in our home while he interviewed them, as if his hospitality were critical to their absolution.
In a tiny bedroom in the east wing I found what I was looking for. Years ago, a murderer had stayed in that room. The woman had bludgeoned her father to death in his private study. Afterwards, she drained some of his blood into a chalice and left the cup on a pedestal in her father’s sanctuary. Her father continued to communicate with her after his death, speaking to her through the enchanted chalice.
“Blood speaks to blood,” the murderer explained. My father showed a strange affection for this monster. He offered her our finest guest quarters, but she insisted on staying in that cramped cell. Knowing she was bound for prison, the murderer had left behind a closetful of evening dresses and shoes. Sequins and beads glittered on black velvet sheaths; iridescent feathers adorned the hems of floor-length satin gowns. I didn’t think those seductive clothes would fit, but they slipped over my body as if they had been made for me.
I chose a red satin dress, slit to the spine. I wore it with black seamed stockings and stiletto pumps, wicked grace notes on my feet. As I stared at my reflection, I felt the murderer’s spirit stealing through my body.
Pale throat and breasts glowed against the crimson.
Fragrance of lilies, cunt-sugar and crimson.
How could I be a virgin, when I looked like this?
My father keeps a distance from his guests, to protect his spiritual hygiene. None of them has ever seen him, though many have tried to push through the scrim that hides him from the world. He sits behind his curtain like the sacramental host while, on the other side, his guests hunger for him. His compassion keeps him separate from the accused. The murderers envy me, living so close to my father. In their fantasies I have an open audience with the wise judge, who listens to my confessions with loving tolerance and absolves me with a gentle touch.
My father once told me that all of their confessions arose from the same crime, and that those crimes originated with lust. Desire was dangerous – a threat to the cohesion of the mind. But my father left me with something more dangerous than desire. Rage demands a consummation of its own, an orgasm turned inside-out. The censors will never let you read this, and my father would hate to hear me use such vulgar language, but I’ve come to believe that murder is an inverted fuck.
My father’s guards escorted me across the lake. A car met us in the city. As soon as the driver opened my door, I dashed for the club. Sheltered by the crowd, I yanked the transmitter out of my ear and let it fall on the floor with the spilled drinks and cigarette butts.
The club had more rooms than my father’s house. Caverns led into cubbyholes, which lengthened into hallways that opened into chapels, and the entire structure – walls, floors, elaborately moulded ceilings – throbbed with a feverish percussion. Soon my pulse was keeping time with the electronic drums, and the rooms I explored felt as intimate as the chambers of my heart. The revellers were lost in their own obsessions. A man struck matches on his lover’s shimmering tits. His tongue sizzled on her flesh. A line of people waited to have letters carved into their bellies and breasts, asses and thighs. By the end of the night, the letters would form a poem.
Did my father know that places like this existed? Probably, but he never would have let me come here. Outside my father’s house, hordes of lovers had been meeting for these cherished private games, while he had kept me locked in his castle.
I stopped in front of a stone grotto. Against one of the outcroppings, a woman braced her nude body, her legs wrapped around her lover’s waist. His hips joined hers in an urgent undulation, his long black hair swinging in time to his thrusts. As his strokes quickened, her fingers raked purple streaks into his skin. Her moans melted into the cacophony around her, but I could see her lips repeatedly forming a single word: Please.
This was a raw ritual compared to the elaborate games I’d seen tonight, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The black pendulum of the man’s hair measured the hours I’d spent alone, imagining this scene. The woman’s flushed throat was mine, and her hot mouth was mine, and the brutal grinding of her flesh and bones into the stone was mine. With his hard cock, her lover was battering the buried atom of her isolation; when he smashed it, she would come into being like a newborn star.
Now I knew what my father had been afraid of.
Jagged laughter tore my reverie. The murderer grabbed my hand and spun me around. My skirt rippled like a blood pool.
“Beautiful!” she shouted over the din.
The murderer wore a black mini skirt and cropped T-shirt, so short that its hem skimmed the underswell of her breasts. Written on the shirt in glittery script were the words FUCK US ALL.
“The interview!” I cried. “Where can we have the interview?”
Her forked tongue swept across her lips. That lewd promise was her only reply.
The murderer led me out of the club through a door that opened into a warped funnel of blackness. She dragged me through a passageway under the city, into the echoing sewers that spread under my father’s lake. She knew every turn by heart, as if she had spent her whole life in the subterranean tunnels of my world.
When we burst into the open air, I heard wind skidding over frozen water, and I knew we were back at the castle. The ice sheets creaked and groaned, singing the same stern song that had lulled me to sleep since I was a child. But the rhythm was different now; the lullaby had been inverted. The night itself had been reversed – even the constellations of stars were upside down.
“Keep moving,” the murderer urged. She was shivering in her scanty clothes.
“Why are we back at the castle?”
“I want you to take me to your father’s study.”
“Then why did you ask me to meet you at the club?”
The murderer smiled. “I had to bring you here through my secret passage,” she said, “or you’d never understand who I am.
She pulled me close and kissed me until my legs turned to water. Her tongue slithered between my lips and tickled the roof of my mouth. My red dress slipped from my shoulders. Her cold fingers crawled across my breasts – squeezing, kneading, as if my flesh held secrets. Our scents rose and mingled, smoke flowers freezing in mid-air.
“Now,” she said, “ask me who I am.”
When you kissed me that nigh
t, I made the mistake of opening my eyes. I wanted to peer into the tunnels of your pupils, into the coils of your brain matter. I wanted to watch the clockworks of your mind, but your face was a glass orb filled with darkness. All I could see was an obsidian opacity. I don’t know what scared me more – the fact that your beautiful skull had turned hollow, or that its surface didn’t reflect me at all. Even a charlatan’s seeing stone would have reflected a white smudge.
Then you slid your tongue into my mouth. Instantly your face was flesh again, your cheeks hot to the touch. You clutched my breasts, pinched my nipples as if to milk blood from the nubs. The treacherous stone in your tongue wasn’t a diamond, but a shard of ice, which melted into sweet water. With one moan, I drowned out the nightmare that I’d seen in your eyes.
She whispered her story into my ear.
Three words. That was her history. Three words, and I knew all I could stand to know. If she had told me any more, I would have fallen off the narrow ledge of myself into the void below.
She slid her finger into my mouth, dug something from the hollow under my tongue, and pressed the object into my palm. It was a key made of bone. She didn’t have to tell me which door the key would open.
“Let’s go see your father,” she said.
We ran up the hill to the castle and flew through the massive doors. We climbed the twisting staircase that led to my father’s study, ascending so high that the air became too thin for us to breathe, and we had to stop to gulp air from each others’ lips. Our hearts banged like lust-drunk birds against the cages of our ribs. We stood in front of the door to his chamber and clung to each other like teenage lovers, our tongues weaving and slapping as we kissed.
Then my father cried out my name.
The murderer’s body stiffened against mine. Our excitement hardened into a crystalline rage. We broke our embrace. I pushed the bone key into the lock. As soon as the door opened, the cry stopped. A staggering silence filled the room.
The study was empty. Cobwebs and their listless shadows stood in lieu of objects. I saw phantom bookshelves that held no books, a pair of hovering chairs, and a floating globe that replicated no world I had ever seen. My father’s private sanctuary was as bereft as a desecrated shrine. At the heart of this sepulchre stood a pedestal draped in threadbare velvet. On top of the pedestal sat a chalice.
I went to the pedestal, lifted the tarnished cup, and looked inside. A layer of dust shifted on the surface of the fluid. A fissure opened in the dust, revealing a crimson crescent, like a mouth. The thin lips parted. The mouth sighed my name.
“That’s his blood,” said the murderer.
I screamed.
The murderer snatched the chalice and tipped it onto the floor. Gore rained in clotted gouts. She pulled something out of the cup. It was a carved bone fragment, identical to the transmitter that my father had given me. I took the shard and held it for a long time, watching it float in my shaking hand.
“Go ahead,” the murderer said. “See if it works.”
I placed it in my ear. Not so much as a whisper seeped through the circuits.
“Do you remember the day he died?” she asked.
“No.”
The murderer squatted on the floor, tracing letters in the red liquid: FUCK US ALL.
Her porcelain cheeks were streaked with blood. I sank to the floor beside her. Using her forefinger as a brush, she painted my mouth.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Now paint mine.”
I did as she said. She caught my finger between her teeth and suckled at the tip. The suction sent a spear of longing through my belly.
“Remember when you came up to this room, the night you told him you were leaving?” she asked. “He said he’d never let you go.”
“I don’t remember.”
“He said you could never leave the castle,” she went on. “You were his lily. His hothouse flower.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You did, my dear.”
“My father can’t be dead. How did he interview all those criminals?”
But I already knew. I had ushered the murderers into the castle and led them into the library, where I sat them down in front of the confessional screen. I had set up the tape recorder to record their stories. The criminals believed they were pouring out their hearts to a man, a corporeal being like themselves. But the voice that spoke to them came from a distant part of the castle. The voice came from my father’s blood.
When the interviews were over, I transcribed the tapes. I wrote my father’s books; I published them under his name. And all the while his blood instructed me, guided me, from the chalice upstairs. Blood speaks to blood.
“You’re remembering, aren’t you?” the murderer said. “Think back. Do you remember why you wanted to escape?”
She kissed me. Our lips and tongues merged in a slippery knot. Her hands slid under my dress and glided up my thighs, up to the crevice that had never been opened. Her fingers sank into flesh so wet that it gave way to her caress like ectoplasm.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
She took hold of my shoulders and pushed me onto my back, parting my knees. Her face, as she gazed down at me with lust-dark eyes, was a mirror image of my own longing. I spread my thighs and raised my hips, so that her lily-white hand could dive into my deepest secrets.
Outside the castle, the lake screamed. The ice was tearing itself apart. When the sheets melted to let the lake’s secrets rise, my father’s remains would bob to the surface. First the small bones would emerge, then the heavier ones, and finally the massive cranium with the star-shaped hole that I made when I bludgeoned him to death.
“Do you remember now?” she asked.
I moaned, tossing my head from side to side.
“You wanted to leave the castle because you wanted to get fucked.” She drove her fist deeper. My mind flashed to the lovers in the club, to the scene that my father had always been afraid of.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I wanted to get fucked.”
“Did you think it was a coincidence, when you found that dress tonight? You used to pay your father’s guards to smuggle those slutty clothes into the castle. You used to lie awake at night, wishing some stranger would break in and deflower you. Like this.”
The murderer drove her vicious little fist in and out of my cunt. She had almost reached the hard atom at my centre. My hips pumped up and down in their own frenzied dance – faster and faster, until my inner walls burned. Then her knuckles struck the core of my memory, and I fell into a blood-red seizure.
My body convulsed. Delirium. The stench of burning cunt and lilies filled the room. I saw the crime I had committed. Blood, ribbons of blood, streamed across the walls and ceiling. I danced among the streamers of bright blood. My father cried out to me from the empty chalice.
Then the moment exploded, and memory became a mist.
Minutes passed, or hours. I sat up, shaking, and pushed my hair out of my eyes. The strands were heavy with clots of dried blood. I looked around at the dusty crepuscule of my father’s study, at the stains that darkened the floor, and remembered nothing.
I was alone.
You were captured that night and thrown back in prison. I send you letters, but the censors cross out all the parts about blood and memory and desire. I don’t know if you read what I’ve written. You never answer. Sometimes I think I’m writing to myself.
I make sure that you’re never left unguarded. I make sure that you’re kept in the smallest possible cell, with no sexy clothes to remind you of who you were when you were free. You are not allowed to have lovers in prison, or to touch yourself, or to fantasize about being touched. Prison life will leave you hollow. You will grow smaller and smaller, until you disappear.
My father and I will be safe here, in the house that murder built. Our devotion to each other will prove that you are a liar, that those three words you spoke to me were a delusion of your fractured mind.
I am y
ou, you whispered into my ear.
No. You are the enemy.
Sakura
Diane Kepler
ICHI
It is that magical week when the cherry blossoms are just past the height of their fullness and their petals begin to flutter down in a fragrant, pink rain. The streets and avenues are quieter somehow, and more comfortable, as if wrapped in a rosy quilt.
The pastel-patterned sidewalk occupies Hiroe as she makes her way home from school. Her gait is dreamlike. At times she slows, lingering under the perfumed boughs, lifting up her face to feel the petals alight. They dot her cheeks and the fragile domes of her closed eyes. Each contact is like a kiss. She smiles to herself, imagining the real kisses that are soon to follow.
He waits for her at the temple. Not grand Kinkakuji or ancient Daitokoji, where the other foreigners swarm like so many pale moths, but the humble sanctuary that marks the spot where her lane joins the main thoroughfare. He is burning incense when she arrives. As always, she is reminded of the first time she saw him there, kneeling composedly, and, as far as she knew from her casual acquaintance with Jodo Buddhism, doing everything exactly right.
NI
She waited, on that first day, until he’d finished his devotions. Waited and then hurried forward as he was stepping into his shoes back on the wide, wooden verandah of the shrine.
“Ex-cu-suh me, pu-ree-suh,” she managed after a great deal of shifting from foot to foot. For the first time, Hiroe had cause to regret all those notes she kept passing during English class. But he was so beautiful. She had to say something.
When he turned she saw how wide his eyes were and, when he answered in polite, idiomatic Japanese, how elegant his smile.
“I’m sorry, Miss, could you repeat that? I didn’t understand.”
“A Kyoto accent,” she’d whispered to Rei and Asuka at school the next day. “It’s as if he’d lived here all his life.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 Page 51
