The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  The real Jenny was in a hotel fire. All her skin was gone. Jenny 2 wasn’t going to be coming back.

  We sat with Manny, and waited, and then suddenly he stood up. He grabbed Sue by the hand and told me to follow and he took us to his quarters and gave me the clothes I’m wearing now. He gave us some money, and told us where to go. I think somehow he knew what was going to happen. Either that, or he just couldn’t take it any more.

  We’d hardly got our clothes on when all hell broke loose. We hid when the men came to find Manny, and we heard what happened.

  Jenny 2 had spoken. They don’t use drugs or anaesthetic, except when the shock of the operation will actually kill the spare. Obviously. Why bother? Jenny 2 was in a terminal operation, so she was awake. When the guy stood over her, smiling as he was about to take the first slice out of her face, she couldn’t help herself, and I don’t blame her.

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t.”

  Three words. It isn’t much. It isn’t so fucking much. But it was enough. She shouldn’t have been able to say anything at all.

  Manny got in the way as they tried to open the tunnels and so they shot him and went in anyway. We ran then, so I don’t know what they did. I shouldn’t think they killed them, because most had lots of parts left. Cut out bits of their brain, probably, to make sure they were all tunnel people.

  We ran, and we walked and we finally made the city. I said goodbye to Sue at the subway, because she was going home on foot. I’ve got further to go, and they’ll be looking for us, so we had to split up. We knew it made sense, and I don’t know about love, but I’d lose both of my hands to have her with me now.

  Time’s running out for both of us, but I don’t care. Manny got addresses for us, so we know where to go. Sue thinks we’ll be able to take their places. I don’t, but I couldn’t tell her. We would give ourselves away too soon, because we just don’t know enough. We wouldn’t have a chance. It was always just a dream, really, something to talk about.

  But one thing I am going to do. I’m going to meet him. I’m going to find Jack’s house, and walk up to his door, and I’m going to look at him face to face.

  And before they come and find me, I’m going to take a few things back.

  BRIAN HODGE

  The Alchemy of the Throat

  BRIAN HODGE has written for bookshelves, movies and comics. His sixth and most recent novel, Prototype, will appear in early 1996. He has also published around fifty short stories and novelettes in a variety of magazines and anthologies, both prestigious and unsavoury, and has recently expanded his interests to post-noir crime fiction.

  His spare time is devoted to tribal ritual music, John Woo movies and wanderlust. He is currently working on a companion story to “The Alchemy of the Throat” (which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award), featuring the original’s Sisters of the Trinity, and a very wilful hermaphrodite. He points out that neither tale is strictly autobiographical.

  MY MUTILATION WAS accomplished when I was a child of seven. I no longer remember myself any other way.

  A recollection of such an act must be buried deep within, but beyond me, lost as I was to a drugged haze. Even so, when I dwell upon it, the event becomes as vivid as only imagination can make it. It must have been very much like this:

  Those to whom my parents sold me plied me with sweets or trinkets, winning my trust until they got me to the conservatory hidden in the Sicilian countryside. And until they got me into the cutting room. Having rendered me insensible, they pulled my pants to my ankles, then held me flat atop a table that was as sterile as they could make it. Hands would have briefly held the little boy’s penis back toward my stomach, while another pair applied the knife to the soft parts below. My scrotum would have been opened swiftly, slit like a small plum and its contents cut out, unwanted pulp. I imagine some snaggletoothed mongrel being tossed these warm and bloody grapes, although there’s no reason to believe that actually happened. It distinguishes it for me, though, and that’s enough.

  Once they were through, my empty sac would have been sewn shut, or the incision simply cauterized. As I grew, the useless and barren scrotum withered away, the excess reabsorbed by my body, leaving nothing behind but the puckered ridge of scar that curves back between my thighs.

  It was done for the sake of music, of course, just as it was done centuries ago. In Italy, some traditions date back so far they have become institutions with lives of their own, and to argue against them must be like trying to argue with God.

  And when traditions must go underground to survive, it sets them in stone harder than granite.

  To the world at large, the castrati sopranos are a vestige of centuries past. I know better, can sing a different tale with a voice that those who trained me told me surpassed even that of an angel. And training me, and others like me, is their life’s purpose, to preserve that which most believe lost to the past.

  One of the maestros who taught me the vocal arts was fond of saying that a true castrato is born, not made.

  It was several years before I knew what he meant by that.

  I was twenty when sent away from the conservatory. My training was complete, my education beyond the arts comprehensive, and my voice honed and polished for thirteen years, an instrument on which a small fortune had been lavished.

  An even greater fortune purchased it outright.

  While our voices, our songs, were a part of daily life, once each year the maestros opened the conservatory to those whose wealth was so fabulous that nothing in the world was denied them. From across the globe they would fly to Palermo; then a small fleet of hired cars would sweep across the Sicilian countryside, to converge upon our ancient edifice of stone and tiles. When rested and dined, they would fill the velvety purple seats in our auditorium, and we would take the stage – the castrati, from whom our lives of birth had been stolen, in their place substituted a regimen that we came to embrace as we came of age, because it was the only choice left to us. The outside world no longer existed for us, as we were no longer made for it.

  So with our audience waiting, a small orchestra would take up its instruments, and we would sing in voices high and sweet and powerful, voices that could plunge even angels into despair over being denied them. Operas by Scarlatti, arias by Verdi, liturgies that had once rung out in the Sistine Chapel for the pleasure of popes . . . music penned for throats just such as ours. Voices whose beauty had always been unearthly – a soprano’s range driven by the power of a male chest – but never more so than now, with so few privileged to hear it.

  As we performed, solos were taken by older castrati, those in their late teens whose days at the conservatory were drawing to a close. Librettos had been distributed to the audience so they might know who was who, with ample margins left for notetaking.

  After the performance, we would mingle over wine and baroque chamber music with our potential benefactors, so they might get to know us up close, and pay us the adoration we had been awaiting for years. We craved it like starving puppies, lapped it up for hours. They would fly home then.

  And within another day or two, the silent auction began.

  His name was Julius, and when I learned he had offered top bid for me, I did recall him: a man of slight build and a slouching elegance when he sat, with the refined and light-skinned features of northern Italy. His blond hair he wore gathered back in a short limp ponytail, and his eyes I especially remembered as watchful and smoky gray.

  I felt a distinct relief; Julius had seemed kind, even respectful. Many of the boys I had grown up with would be making their new homes with leering old men whose money could purchase only the thinnest veneer of refinement. In my room, a week before all the financial and travel arrangements would be completed, I remember feeling quite lucky.

  He sent men in his employ to meet me in Palermo, and take me over from the conservatory’s escorts, and back I went with them to southern Italy, just outside of Capua. He lived in a huge old villa, a rambling fortr
ess of cool marble worn smooth by centuries and laced with ivy. The gardens had gone to riot, choked with flowers that needed better tending, a colorful bedlam out of which rose crumbling statues of old Roman gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines. Fountains splashed with greenish water, in which frolicked frozen nymphs and satyrs.

  It possessed an ageless beauty, and I, the castrato Giovanni, was but its newest fixture.

  “It originally belonged to a Roman senator, as a secondary home,” Julius explained as he gave me the tour. “I’ve had it restored, and remodeled to accommodate modern conveniences, but beyond that, I’ve tried not to tamper with the feel of the place. I’m mostly content to know he walked here . . . whoever the fat old sybarite was. It’s my joke upon him, and that has to be enough. By now I can’t help but realize it can never be much of a triumph.”

  I found it an odd thing to say, and frowned, as if there had to be more that he wasn’t telling me. I realized Julius was older than I’d thought at the conservatory, small lines cut around his mouth and his eyes. Perhaps it was the harshness of the sun. At my puzzlement, Julius waved his hand in the air, dismissive.

  “You’ll understand, in time.”

  I nodded, as if this made perfect sense. It was what my kind had been taught to do; we knew so little of the world beyond the conservatory. Our education was broad, so that we would be well-equipped to converse with our benefactors. But what had we really seen, experienced? So little. We’d been born into poverty, every one of us, a salvation to our parents when we displayed precocious talent for song. But all we’d done was exchange the limitations of poverty for a cloistered life as carved throwbacks to an earlier century.

  Capua, and life with a new master, was an entirely new world to me. My first night under Julius’ roof, I huddled in a corner of my room, hugging my arms about my body as it trembled, as tears ran freely. And where were the friends of my youth this night, my brothers, lovers, cut by the same cruel blade? Did they miss me as much as I missed them? I would never see them again, never know their fates. It seemed a deeper loss than that left between my legs. I’d not felt orphaned since I was seven years old, but this night it was as if my family had died to me all over again.

  I was roused by a late-night knock at the door. I splashed my face with water from a bowl before answering. In the doorway stood Francesca, the short, compact old woman who, as near as I could tell, ran the daily business of the house for Julius. She cooked for him, supervised the cleaning by maids who came in from town, had seemed terribly unfriendly to me when we were first introduced and looked no kinder tonight. Her whitening hair she wore pulled back in a severe knot; her eyes were as even as an executioner’s, and nearly as warm.

  “He’s ready for you now.”

  I blinked stupidly. I’d not been told to expect a summons.

  “In his bedchamber.” Francesca glared, impatient. “A song? Or did the maestros cut away a portion of your brain, too?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I – I . . .” Oh, what a terrible impression I was making on my first day here. I grabbed a towel to dry my face, then let her lead me to where Julius lay, awaiting some lullaby to ease him to sleep.

  As I paced the cool tiled floors, I thought of those who had, in centuries past, performed similar duties. History’s most famous castrato, an eighteenth-century Neapolitan known as Farinelli, conquered the stages of Europe, but gave up his career at the age of thirty-two to serve as nightingale to the court of King Philip V of Spain. Summoned by the Queen, Farinelli first roused the king from a somber depression that confined him to bed, refusing to bathe, and afterward, for ten years sang the same four arias every night at Philip’s bedtime.

  Our voices can work magic; this too is old tradition.

  Francesca tapped once at Julius’ door, opened it, shut it after me without following. It seemed a vast room, dominated by a bed in which Julius’ slim form was nearly lost. Soft moonlight spilled through the windows, dappling the room with shadows and a blue luster. Approaching the bed, I felt a peculiar power steal over me. This was what I was meant for. Julius may have been the master, but once I opened my mouth, I would be the one in control.

  Our eyes met in the gloom, each of us expectant. Lying there, he seemed many things to me, most of them contradictions. Julius was ageless and ancient, child and crone, a cruel sodomite and a tender saint.

  “Is there some special song you have in mind?” I asked.

  He shook his head against its pillows, the silky blond hair unbound and glowing with moonlight. “Whatever you like.”

  I discarded all the music I knew for the stage; it might have been beautiful enough, but did not seem appropriate for a lullaby. Instead I lifted my voice with music intended to glorify something higher, written for the throats of young boys, with sweet innocent voices. What I lacked in innocence, I could more than compensate for in feeling. Through “L’abondance Cibavit” and “Alleluia”, “Pange Lingua” and “Ave Verum”, my voice rang warmly off the stone walls, cocooned us with its strange presence, turned Julius’ room into a sanctuary.

  I gazed at him as the notes lifted, soared, watching as he lay with eyes closed, soaking in every nuance. He was a sponge, taking in all that poured from my throat, my soul. His brow would furrow, then relax; beneath the sheets his body would flex taut, then sink with exhaustive splendor.

  Every singer hopes for such an audience: one who listens so raptly, riding the crest of every note, until it no longer feels as if the song is being shaped by the singer at all. It felt instead that the music lay within me, perfect and whole, as pure as it had been imagined by its composer as he set it to paper, and Julius was pulling it from me as he might reel in a rope. I lost myself, floating among the notes, until the music was finished.

  Silence, for many moments. Then:

  “Splendid, Giovanni,” he whispered. “Absolutely splendid.”

  I smiled, wondering if he could even see it. My entire worth was tied to his response. “More?”

  “Soon. Sit, would you?” He kicked once beneath the sheets, indicated a spot near the foot of the bed.

  I sat, wondering if Julius expected my favors to be physical as well as musical, and if so, if the seduction would begin this very first night. Castrati were strange creatures indeed, alluring to many women and to no few men, as well, even men who had never loved another of their own kind. Our hair was thick and lustrous, our skin soft and smooth, our faces never touched by a razor. We were androgynes whose service to either sex was limited only by our inclinations, and certainly I, with dark curls hanging to my shoulders and a bit of the brown-eyed, olive-skinned look of a peasant girl, broke no traditions.

  “When you sing that type of music,” said Julius, “I can close my eyes and picture a cathedral full of boys in robes, who trust their priests and believe every word that crosses their own young lips. Their faith is still . . . intact. Then I open my eyes and I see you, and I know that intact doesn’t necessarily mean inviolable. Is your faith the same as theirs, Giovanni?”

  I was not expecting this, but welcomed it over desperate advances. “When I was their age, it was, probably. But I’m older now, and I know how many lies are told to children. So my faith lies in the beauty of the notes, not the meaning of the words. The words are immaterial to me now. I could sing of degradation, and the music would sound just as beautiful.”

  “Latin has that insulating effect, doesn’t it?” Julius said, and we both laughed. “Keep your faith in beauty, then, and it’ll always be well-placed. I suspect beauty is one of the few things that’s always there to sustain us whenever we need it.”

  I nodded, thinking of the young castrati – whose sacrifice was irreversible – who had lost their voices to impinging manhood just the same, to be left with nothing. The knife was no guarantee. In the old times they became voice teachers, composers, musicians, or let themselves be destroyed by their own despair. And today? They disappeared from the conservatory, quietly; last seen at supper, and absent fro
m the breakfast table. None of the maestros ever said what happened to them. None of us dared ask. There but for the grace of God went I, some would think while staring at a boy’s empty chair, but none of us truly believed that God’s mercy had anything to do with it. How could infinite mercy be so . . . random?

  “More, now, I think,’ said Julius, motioning me to stand.

  So again I sang, and by the time I finished for the night, I could swear that those lines on Julius’ face, which earlier seemed so prominent, had now faded away to all but nothing.

  * * *

  I settled in over the next weeks, and it felt like home, at least as much a home as the conservatory had ever felt. Francesca grew no warmer toward me, but to Julius I took a steadily growing liking. I couldn’t have asked for a more appreciative audience, and after mornings, when he attended to his investments, he would shed this cloak of obligations and we might often talk for hours of more timeless things: of music and art, of beauty and souls. He was endlessly curious about my vocal training, was deliriously happy to hang over my shoulder as I sat at the harpsichord and demonstrated exercises the maestros had used to shape us from our raw childish ore. Sometimes it felt as if Julius were digging into me, pawing about in some dogged search for answers that had always eluded him.

  “Did you have hopes of being a singer once?” I asked him.

  “No. Oh no. There are voices, and there are ears. I’ve never mistaken my place in the arrangement. Still,” and he shrugged, memories seeming to swell behind his eyes like forgotten sorrows, “to be one of those few voices worth listening to seems to me to be a holy thing. You make yourself sacred by what you’ve done with your voice. The rest of us? We just absorb it, and know we’ll never see or hear anything that pure emerging from ourselves.”

  “You’re discounting yourself.” And why did I care to salve his feelings? He had, after all, paid money for me, my life. “Voices need those ears. You may love us, but we need you. What choir sings to itself?”