In the other room, Severin’s roommate lies still as death under her bedcover, eyelids closed shut, hands against her mouth, pretending to sleep. Tomorrow morning, as always, she will pretend she does not remember how they sounded as they floated through the room, the long laces of their boot-clad feet making faint scratching sounds against the polished concrete floor. She will pretend she did not slip the blankets from her head after they slowly bled like grey candle smoke under the crack of the door, did not creep to the window and carefully pull back one edge of the curtain ever so slightly, did not feel the pupil of her right eye blossom wide in fright as she caught glimpses of them fluttering and winding their way four stories down through the thick trees onto the needle-covered dirt road that serpentines through the dorm complex. She will pretend she did not hear their laughter, rising with the wind. She will pretend she does not see how her glossy blonde hair grows whiter and duller with each passing day.
Later in the evening, after the show is over, Knox and Severin stand outside the club, violet-scented clove cigarettes burning down in their hands as they watch everyone else stream out, prancing like drugged werewolves down the empty 2am streets, howling and smashing empty bottles against brick walls and blacktop before melting away into the crevices of downtown Bellingham. The autumn air is chilly, and a recent sheen of rain coats everything, glistening and alive under the street lamps and buzzing neon signs. To the south, the lights of the university nestle and shine just below the dark slick of forest that blankets the massive hill behind the campus. One of those lights might be coming from Severin’s dorm window, but she can’t know for sure. From down here, in the misty night, it’s all just a pale yellow smear, like phosphorescent mold seeping out of the earth.
Severin walks into the middle of the street, spins in a series of slow circles, leaving behind bioluminescent spirals that hold their shape in the air despite the brisk wind. It doesn’t matter. No matter where she travels, she feels the links of her life leading all the way across the city and back to that room in a never-ending chain of ugly and mundane human obligations—homework, grades, unpaid bills, unanswered messages from parents and friends. It tugs at her neck like a leash and her cobalt lips grow cold—but here, with Knox, in the night, the links are somewhat weaker. Here, even in the midst of rows of blank and soulless box buildings, she feels a greater pull, up and away from the endless tangle of telephone wires that always mar her view of the limitless skies above. A pull toward what, however, she has never been able to say. She simply knows it’s out there, watching, waiting. She knows Knox feels it—he’s a part of it. And his mysterious ways flow from him into her, his generosity covers and enters her in spark and cold flame. At his side she can see the world and travel through it as he does. But when he fills her up until it wells out of her like pyroclastic plumes, what she feels calling her is not him.
“Now what,” Knox says, two steps behind, walking through her glittering wake as she meanders down the street. His left hand is at his waist, slender fingers unconsciously looping around the bands of black leather at his waist, tapping, tapping just above the thick curve of his jeans. Perhaps consciously. He’s done it too many times not to know that Severin knows what that means, how to respond, what she receives in return. She drops her cigarette to the ground and slides it across the pavement with the sole of her boot, then sidles over, pressing her crotch against his thigh as she wraps her arm around his waist, her hand gently gripping his ass. He smells like smoke and warm booze, the lingering remains of cedar oil, burnt wax and unspent spells. Severin reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a crumpled flier.
Knox sighs.
“No, wait. This one is different.” She slips her arm away and unfolds the flier. A delicate ink outline of a gable-roofed house decorates the bottom of the flier, flanked on either side by tall evergreens that travel up the long sides. The middle of the page is crammed with tiny block letters, name after name of bands all forming a monolithic block that hovers over the house like a descending celestial fist.
“You’re right. This one is different. They won’t let you in.”
“But with you.”
“The other houses were more…lenient. This house, this court, is not.”
Severin wants to say, so they wouldn’t let you in either, but she keeps it to herself. She doesn’t know. She knows nothing about this man. Except that he’s not a man.
They reach the corner of Forest and Chestnut, and Severin pauses in the middle of the intersection. If cars pass by them, pass through them, they cannot tell. They travel slightly beside time and not in it. Knox takes a step toward Forest, which leads back toward the campus. Severin looks up past the intersection to the point in the dark where Chestnut disappears, curves, and becomes Bayview.
“There’ll be other nights, Severin. Let this one go. It’s not for us.”
“Not even if we just stood in the yard?”
“I could come inside you for a thousand years, and it wouldn’t be enough.”
Severin stares at him. Her breasts strain against her fishnet top, the gold-dusted nipples poking out. Slowly her hand brushes down the front of her plaid kilt, and lifts it, past the tops of her torn stockings and the tight elastic garters, up past the thick black V of her fur. She runs her fingers through the tight curls, pulls the hair forward, and releases it. Red wet flickers of light flare up and gather around her hair, nestling, illuminating. Knox sighs again, deeper and longer, his hand moving down the hard length of his crotch.
“Take me to the house. We don’t need to go inside. I just want to see.” She steps back, and Knox moves forward. She feels his presence push out, push up against her, running itself up her legs and pooling in the wet folds of her aching flesh. His mysterious ways. She takes another step back, unpinning her kilt and letting it drop to the wet ground. It will make its way back to her before the end of the night. She turns around and begins walking up Chestnut, her bare ass illuminated by the sodium street lights, by the strange light of her desire.
“Take me to the house.”
“We weren’t invited.”
“It’s a flier.”
“A flier that wasn’t intended for us.”
“We’ll stand on the other side of the street. They won’t be able to do a thing.”
“No.”
Severin turns, purses her cobalt lips tight together, and pops them open. Her mouth is a lava tube O of dark red fire, embers rising up out of her throat and catching in the high peaks of her hair, along with her high-pitched banshee scream.
She runs along the streets, up the cracked and weed-clogged sidewalks, her thin legs pumping back and forth, hands balled up into tight fists, nails digging bloody moons into her palms. She screams and stumbles, crashes through bushes and brush, dashes along the tops of cars, then slows, turns back and looks. Knox is a tiny dot at the end of a shining asphalt line. She speeds up again, rounding the corner just as he rises in the air, body changing into what it is she has never seen, but it is fast and it is relentless and it loves to pursue her more than she loves to be chased, and now she is truly frightened because there is that moment when he catches her and she cannot quite be certain he remembers who she is and what dreamlike emotions from that other world he inhabits that alien other world which is her world might prevent him from devouring her with all of his needle thin teeth in all those mouths she catches quick glimpses of as they click and slide back in and out of other times and now she is animal running racing in the dark under stars under moons the great raging beast just behind her now in the wind at her back in the brush of the branches as they bend toward her in the uplift of the earth as she races up the low long slope of hill a worn road that leads directly to the edge of the forest the great forest the deep forest the forest that hovers high over all of the city watching and waiting and taking and an ephemeral hand is at her throat, and her legs kick out and away and she’s crashing onto the ground.
Blackness and motion and air eddy and gyre around
her, and within the currents Severin sees the shape of her lover’s body gorging and engorging itself on her fear, forging itself into a suggestion of the being she loves. She rolls over onto her knees and crouches, shaking, her hands and elbows bruised and bloody, bits of gravel and dirt ground in with the flesh. Later, in the cool pale hours of morning, even though she’ll be able to heal herself, Knox will lick her body until no trace of the wounds remains. Severin slips her jacket off—she is nothing but marble flesh covered in the transparent black remnants of clothing, bleeding and gasping for breath, her mouth and cunt twin furnaces of magic and desire. Ghostly fingers run across the outline of her jaw, touch her lips. She opens her mouth again, tears streaming down her face. She can see the bright light pouring out from her lips, feel the flesh twist and coil around in endless spirals. Out of the smoke and flame before her Knox takes full shape: legs that end somewhere in the pillars of clouds that float far beyond the edges of the Milky Way, torso and multiple arms that extend back in time to all the moments of creation large and small, a faceless head with horns that pierce the stars and move them through the skies. Severin leans forward. Out of the roiling black, it emerges: thick, wet, pulsing with veins of what she knows could not be fire. Viscous drops of light drip slowly from its rounded tip—Severin catches one with her tongue, then a second, letting her hot flesh gently flick away. She hears him moan, a long and deep rumble that sounds like the wind rushing down from the ancient mountains—he shifts, and his cock presses against her open lips, but he does not force himself. He never has. In calmer moments, Severin pretends this is his equivalent of a declaration of love.
And now Severin bends forward again, her burning mouth sliding around and down the great shaft. She cannot describe in her human language how it feels, to be so transformed, a hollowed-out girl reformed into fire, filling herself with the crippling desire of an unfathomable and vast being who moves through the human world as a strange skinny boy. She closes her eyes, but the heat from her own body burns the lashes away, and then the lids. There is never pain, but it frightens her nonetheless; and she clamps down harder, locking her jaw as her mouth rotates in hard wet circles around his flesh, as he pumps harder and faster, until they are an engine, a blur, a storm.
He comes. It’s an explosion inside her—thick gouts of magic pouring from his cock into her throat, spreading through her body like wildfire, burning away every centimeter of her humanity and fashioning her briefly into something else. Above her, on another plane of existence, Knox is screaming. Severin knows she screams with him, but hers is primal, cellular, atomic.
She feels him slip away, out of her mouth, trailing sticky threads of semen that hang off her bruised lips and burn away in the air. The winds around them grow cold again, and all the little nagging reminders of humanity come rushing in to fill Knox’s absence—her aching legs, her stiff back, her numb face. He shudders, grows smaller, brighter, and appears before her again a contained, beautiful young man, naked and dripping with sweat. A light rain patters down. Severin tries to blink the drops away, then remembers. She places her hands just over her eyes, concentrating. Strange how thinking a thing can make it happen. Blinking her blindness away, she reaches out. Knox grabs her hand and pulls her to her feet. He always does. And then he always moves away, for a while. This is always how it is. Is he embarrassed? Repulsed? She’ll never ask, so she’ll never know.
They stand at the end of a narrow residential street. Small wooden houses sit on either side of them, nestled in between clumps of gigantic firs. This is the edge of Sehome, the great untouched forest that rules from the center of Bellingham. Severin looks down the street. From here, she sees the shimmering metallic smear of downtown and the smoking jumble of paper mills, the bay curving like a lidless blue-black eye, and the great war of trees and human dreams—rigid roads and rows of houses slashing out against unyielding legions of Pinopsida. This war has been won in other cities, but not in Bellingham. And around them all floats the jagged grin of mountains, the endless unblemished arc of the sky.
“No telephone wires,” she croaks. “No wires.”
She led him right to it, led him with his unthinking cock. This is her mysterious way.
Across the street, lights wink on and off and on. Small and multi-colored, like fireflies rising up in clouds from the thick grass. An upstairs window, apple-round, glows soft pink. And then the downstairs windows burst into bright light, and sound spills out of the opening door, heavy beats of bass and drum, and then a woman’s voice kicks in, powerful and smooth like a marble fist to the mouth. Eurythmics. You have no FUCKING idea what you’ve done. Knox is speaking somewhere behind her, but she’s ignoring him. Her motorcycle jacket is back on her body, her kilt is reassembling itself around her hips, and she’s gathering herself together as she walks across the slick blacktop, stopping at the unruly edge of the lawn. Severin remembers the rule. She pulls the flier out of her pocket. The house is exactly as it was drawn, gables and all. Behind it, the evergreens of Sehome stand silent and high.
The front door opens, and a man steps out. Severin holds up the flier. He beckons to her, and she steps onto the court’s soft lawn.
The lights wink out: the music stops.
For a brief, dizzying second, Severin thinks she’s losing her balance—so complete and sudden is the lack of sound, it’s as if the entire planet shifted beneath her feet. She gasps and raises her hands, anticipating the fall. It never comes.
This was a mistake: she turns, slow and deliberate, so as not to attract the inhabitants of the house, praying she’ll see Knox. She’ll fly across the street to him, silently admitting her mistake; and he’ll fold her into his arms and whisk her away back to her ordinary little dorm, and all will be well.
She faces the now-darkened house.
Severin blinks, and turns.
She faces the house.
She made her choice, and the court holds her to it. She does not turn again.
Gradually, as though waking from a deep, antediluvian dream, the world blossoms back around her, above her, below. Stars studding the kodachromatic skies, winking and whispering their radio emissions across the velvet-green lands. The warm ocean of air, eddies and currents combing through the thick trees and caressing her face with its cedar-scented waves as it flows through the clearing. Crickets, cicadas and frogs, their songs of loneliness and love rising and falling, rising and falling. Fireflies, sparking and humming like miniature Tesla coils. Severin slips her jacket off, and it slithers to the grass in a series of thick whispers. Somewhere behind her in the world she can no longer see, in the suburban peaks and valleys of Bellingham, cold high autumn reigns. It is high summer here, so warm she tastes the perfume of ripening petals against her tongue. Severin bends down and stares at her boots, then steps out of them as they peel away from her flesh, leaving them beside her jacket. Then she does the same with her top, burning it away from her body with a single thought and letting the ashes float to the grass; and then her kilt slides off her hips. It looks as if some nameless girl was ripped out of her clothing, leaving it behind in a jumble as she was spirited away into the dusk.
And the door is still open. Here, in the legerdemain dark of the world, her magicked eyesight adjusts and the house reappears under scudding silver clouds and the ivory mass of the moon. Inside, nude shapes collide like columns of candle smoke and drift apart. Severin run a hand across her forehead, down her throat: it rests against the soft mound of her left breast, as if she is both cradling and caressing herself. The fireflies dart through the door, whirl and circle, gather close. The light grows bright and hard, begins moving forward. Severin wants to step back, but she’s at the edge of the lawn—stepping back will only put her back at the edge of the lawn. This is what she wanted, anyway.
The light moves closer, of its own accord, seemingly—an old-fashioned lantern of glass and strawberry-red copper, polished to perfection, a slender round cage in which the fireflies swarm around and around in languid circles.
It’s only until it’s a few feet out of the door and past the two low stone steps that Severin sees what’s holding the round handle. A branch, dark and slender, devoid of needles or leaves. The lamp moves across the lawn, and the branch shows no sign of ending. It exudes from the doorway like placid water, smooth and graceful, its smaller limbs wrapped around the handle. Severin looks past the door, but sees no being, no creature at the branch’s end. The flier is still in her hand, crumpled and damp. She lets it drift to the ground.
The lantern stops at the end of a small path of stones set into the grass. Severin stands, hesitant, waiting. As if from a far distance, she hears snatches and threads of familiar music, the soft throb of bass. The party is still happening, she realizes, back in the human world, as if it were simply around a corner and yet down a corridor that stretched for a million miles. Another branch splits from the main column, stretching out from underneath the lantern toward her. Knox’s magic is still simmering inside her, and she reaches out her hand. Little bolts of pale red fire ripple down through her bones, push out and off her fingertips into the air as they touch the tips of the branch. It spirals around her fingers, slides away, runs a hard tip up the length of her pale white skin, resting in the veined crook of her arm before continuing up to her shoulder, then over and settling around one red nipple, curling itself in place.
Furnace Page 7
