“There are a lot of things that you don’t know,” she said.
She unfastened the trousers and let them fall, revealing smooth, shapely legs and angular hips, delicate bones sloping towards a silver-furred delta full of rich pink secrets.
So still and pale she was, pale eyes, pale hair, pale skin. Alex could almost believe she had never moved at all. He felt heavy and frozen as if he had been still forever too, and they were both the stone children of some forgetful sculptor.
When she spoke, it was shocking, a blunt hammer shattering the fragile moment.
“You can leave if you’d like,” she said, her voice a soft whisper. The world was suddenly alive with possibilities. There was a shadow of vulnerability in her flawless face igniting fierce passion inside Alex, passion that clenched his fists and closed his throat. As the two-dimensional fiction of his childish fantasy crashed and burned, he found an astonishing new love in its ashes.
“No,” he said, his voice cracking as if he had been silent for years. “I never want to leave. I want to be yours forever.”
She smiled at him and his body went weak and hot, shivering as her narrow hand reached out to touch his throat. Her fingers sought his pulse, tracing the path of his blood beneath the skin. She touched his mouth and he kissed her fingers, drawing them in and biting gently, teasing. Scolding with her eyes, she pulled them away and brought them to her lips, tasting his saliva. He strained against his bonds, acting to touch her.
Standing apart, she watched him struggle, her face cool and thoughtful. Then, without warning, she leapt up and straddled him with frightening grace.
The shock of her flesh against his, her thighs brushing his hips, the soft skin of her belly caressing his burning erection, incinerated any doubts and left only incandescent lust that allowed for nothing else. If she wanted his life, he would gladly give it, baring his throat to her with unflinching trust. He surrendered to her kiss with his whole heart, letting her tongue take him the way a man takes a woman, the sharp points of her teeth slashing his tender lips. Blood flowed hot, like his love.
She pulled away, eyes wild and hungry. All pretense of calm objectivity was gone.
“Tell me you love me,” she said.
Alex was crying again, blood in his mouth.
“Yes,” he sobbed. “Yes, I love you.”
She moved like a snake striking, her teeth penetrating the skin of his throat as his cock penetrated the slick mystery of her silver delta. Pain and pleasure fell in love with each other inside of him, fusing together into a single living emotion. Alex lost himself in her, in the pure circuit of mutual need. Hunger and sustenance. Lust and fulfillment. Giving and taking in a balance as old as time. As Alex gave himself over to the little death, filling her with blood and semen and the heady liquor of his love, he felt himself falling away into glittering blackness, melting down into the distillate essence of himself. The last thing he felt before unconsciousness claimed him was the meaty withdrawal of her invading teeth and a swelling sense of emptiness and loss.
When Alex woke, the first thing he became aware of was pain. Not the glorious ecstasy of the night before, but an ugly throbbing ache that spread burning fingers across his jaw and down into his shoulder. His fingers flew to his throat and found oozing scab and bright new hurt. His wrists ached. His head rattled with broken glass as he peeled back sticky eyelids to reveal gray morning sunlight. Beside him, his lover lay curled in on herself, lost in uneasy dreams. The dirty illumination was not kind to her sleeping face. Her skin was fragile as paper, pulled too tightly over sharp bones. Pale makeup smeared her pillow, no longer hiding the pinstripes of facelift scar beneath her chin.
She began to stir beneath his scrutiny, bloodshot gray eyes sliding open and then narrowing to indignant slits against the morning sun.
“Christ,” she said, hands cradling her head. “You’re still here?”
“Of course,” Alex said, hurt and confusion creeping into his voice. “I thought…”
“Oh please.” The trick cut him off with a tired gesture. She sat up slowly and spat something into her cupped hand. “Let’s not have an unpleasant scene, ok?”
She opened her fingers, revealing an arch of plastic connecting a pair of hollow fang teeth.
Choking on raw disappointment, Alex turned his face away. A thousand black emotions fought like starving dogs inside his belly. The trusting child who had fallen so hard so fast was torn apart, his fragile body lacerated by shrapnel and jagged fragments of his rejected love. The darkly cynical street urchin whipped himself with razor-tipped I-told-you-so’s, disgusted at having been so suckered. Shame bloomed like rot and in the hot furnace of his heart, the shame smelted into viscous anger.
She was digging through a bedside drawer, her back to him, dismissing him utterly. From a tiny box of gold and lapis, she shook out a candy-colored handful of pills, sorting through the shapes to select a chemical cocktail. As she raised them to her dry lips, Alex’s anger boiled over and he grabbed her skinny wrist, turning her to face him. Pills tumbled to the carpet, rolling like pearls.
“Hey, what the fuck is your problem,” she said, her voice harsh and shrewish.
“I believed in you.” Alex was furious, his fingers tightening around her wrist.
If she had cursed at him and told him to fuck off, he might have just taken the money and slunk away, but instead she burst into nasty laughter that raked the tender meat of Alex’s freshly broken heart.
“Oh please,” she said. “Give me a break.” She yanked her hand free from his grip. “You got what you wanted, I got what I wanted. What’s the problem?”
She bent down to retrieve the lost pharmaceuticals as if there were nothing left to be said.
Watching her chasing after the pills the way he had chased that hundred-dollar bill in another lifetime, Alex was filled with rage and hate and other more obscure emotions that tore him in a thousand directions at once. He clenched his fists, still feeling her fragile bones grinding under his grip. Staring at the shivering curve of her spine, he was struck with a sudden contradictory desire. Something about her vulnerability, her humanity, brought saliva to his mouth and hot blood to his slow-blooming erection. Then his eyes fell on the jeweled knife.
He reached out and caressed the back of her head, twining his fingers in her hair. At first she was tense, wary, but soon he felt her relax against his touch. Kneeling behind her amid the scattered pills, he slid an arm around her waist and pressed against the length of her back. With his other hand, he walked his fingers across the carpet until they found the cool metal of the knife. Tightening his grip on her hair, he kissed her softly on the cheek and yanked her head back.
The edge of the blade bit deep into her scarred throat and she bucked frantically against him, scrambling away. Silent fury sang in his veins as he leapt after her, pinning her again and pulling her close. Belly to belly, he held her wrists and pressed his face to the welling blood, a hot baptism driven by the dying panic of her cruel heart. He opened the wound wider with his teeth, tongue probing deep in the living meat as she thrashed against him. The vital flavor of her life spilling down his throat was beyond ecstasy, nauseating and luxurious and unlike anything Alex had ever imagined. This was no romantic fantasy, this was brutal reality, pure and delicious.
When she began to tire, her body going limp and still in his embrace, he unlocked his jaws and his fists, looking down into her face.
Gray mortality spilled across her features and made a lie out of all her careful artifice. Alex studied her while she died, but there was no revelation at the last minute, no shining truth. Just a shaky exhalation and then the unremarkable spectacle of slowly cooling meat.
After a moment of thoughtful contemplation, he found the blood-slick blade and opened her belly, sawing through tough abdominal muscle and spreading the lips of the gash with curious fingers. Nothing but the mundane truth that lies behind all our skin, wet and stinking and utterly human.
It seemed he sh
ould hate her for her subtle lies and her mortality, but instead he felt a strange, nostalgic affection. He knew he would always remember her. He had given her his cherry, and in return she had made him into a real vampire, after all.
* * *
White Chapel
by Douglas Clegg
“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
—from Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
I
You are a saint,” the leper said, reaching her hand out to clutch the saffron-dyed robe of the great man of Calcutta, known from his miracle workings in America to his world-fame as a holy man throughout the world. The sick woman said in perfect English, “My name is Jane. I need a miracle. I can’t hold it any longer. It is eating away at me. They are.” She labored to breathe with each word she spoke.
“Who?” the man asked.
“The lovers. Oh, god, two years keeping them from escaping. Imprisoned inside me.”
“You are possessed by demons?”
She smiled, and he saw a glimmer of humanity in the torn skin. “Chose me because I was good at it. At suffering. That is whom the gods choose. I escaped, but had no money, my friends were dead. Where could I go? I became a home for every manner of disease.”
“My child,” the saint said, leaning forward to draw the rags away from the lepers face. “May God shine His countenance upon you.”
“Don’t look upon me, then, my life is nearly over,” the leper said, but the great man had already brought his face near hers. It was too late. Involuntarily, the leper pressed her face against the saints, lips bursting with fire-heat. An attendant of the saints came over and pulled the leper away, swatting her on the shoulder.
The great man drew back, wiping his lips with his sleeve.
The leper grinned, her teeth shiny with droplets of blood. “The taste of purity,” she said, her dark hair falling to the side of her face. “Forgive me. I could not resist. The pain. Too much.”
The saint continued down the narrow alley, back into the marketplace of what was called the City of Joy, as the smell of fires and dung and decay came up in dry gusts against the yellow sky.
The leper woman leaned against the stone wall, and began to ease out of the cage of her flesh. The memory of this body, like a book written upon the nerves and sinews, the pathways of blood and bone, opened for a moment, and the saint felt it, too, as the leper lay dying.
My name is Jane, a brief memory of identity, but with no other past to recall, her breath stopped, the saint reached up to feel the edge of his lips, his face, and wondered what had touched him.
What could cause the arousal he felt.
II
“He rescued five children from the pit, only to flay them alive, slowly. They said he savored every moment, and kept them breathing for as long as he was able. He initialed them. Kept their faces.” This was overheard at a party in London, five years before Jane Boone would ever go to White Chapel, but it aroused her journalist’s curiosity for it was not spoken with a sense of dread, but with something approaching awe and wonder, too. The man of whom it was spoken had already become a legend.
Then, a few months before the entire idea sparked in her mind, she saw an item in the Bangkok Post about the woman whose face had been scraped off with what appeared to be a sort of makeshift scouring pad. Written upon her back, the name, Meritt. This woman also suffered from amnesia concerning everything that had occurred to her prior to losing the outer skin of her face; she was like a blank slate.
Jane had a friend in Thailand, a professor at the University, and she called him to find out if there was anything he could add to the story of the faceless woman. “Not much, I’m afraid,” he said, aware of her passion for the bizarre story. “They sold tickets to see her, you know. I assume she’s a fraud, playing off the myth of the white devil who traveled to India, collecting skins as he went. Don’t waste your time on this one. Poor bastards are so desperate to eat, they’ll do anything to themselves to put something in their stomachs. You know the most unbelievable part of her story?”
Jane was silent.
He continued, “This woman, face scraped off, nothing human left to her features, claimed that she was thankful that it had happened. She not only forgave him, she said, she blessed him. If it had really happened as she said, who would possibly bless this man? How could one find forgiveness for such a cruel act? And the other thing, too. Not in the papers. Her vagina, mutilated, as if he’d taken a machete to open her up. She didn’t hold a grudge on that count, either.”
In wartime, men will often commit atrocities they would cringe at in their everyday lives. Jane Boone knew about this dark side of the male animal, but she still weathered the journey to White Chapel because she wanted the whole story from the mouth of the very man who had committed what was known in the latter part of the century as the most unconscionable crime, without remorse. If the man did indeed live among the Khou-dali at the furthest point along the great dark river, it was said that perhaps he sought to atone for his past—White Chapel was neither white nor a chapel, but a brutal outpost which had been conquered and destroyed from one century to the next since before recorded history. Always to self-resurrect from its own ashes, only to be destroyed again. The British had anglicized the name at some sober point in their rule, although the original name, Y-Cha-Pa when translated, was Monkey God Night, referring to the ancient temple and celebration of the divine possession on certain nights of the dry season when the god needed to inhabit the faithful. The temple had mostly been reduced to ashes and fallen stone, although the ruins of its gates still stood to the southeast.
Jane was thirty-two and had already written a book about the camps to the north, with their starvation and torture, although she had not been well reviewed stateside. Still, she intended to follow the trail of Nathan Meritt, the man who had deserted his men at the height of the famous massacre. He had been a war hero who, by those court-martialed later, was said to have been the most vicious of torturers. The press had labeled him, in mocking Joseph Campbell’s study The Hero With A Thousand Faces, “The Hero Who Skinned A Thousand Faces.” The war had been over for a good twenty years, but Nathan was said to have fled to White Chapel. There were reports that he had taken on a Khou-dali wife and fathered several children over the two decades since his disappearance. Nathan Meritt had been the most decorated hero in the war—children in America had been named for him. And then the massacre, and the stories of his love of torture, of his rituals of skin and bone… it was the most fascinating story she had ever come across, and she was shocked that no other writer, other than one who couched the whole tale in a wide swath of fiction, had sought out this living myth. While Jane couldn’t get any of her usual magazines to send her gratis, she had convinced a major publishing house to at least foot expenses until she could gather some solid information.
To get to White Chapel, one had to travel by boat down a brown river in intolerable heat. Mosquitoes were as plentiful as air, and the river stank of human waste. Jane kept the netting around her face at all times, and her boatman took to calling her Nettie. There were three other travelers with her. Rex, her photographer, and a British man and wife named Greer and Lucy. Rex was not faring well—he’d left Kathmandu in August, and had lost twenty pounds in just a few weeks. He looked like a balding scarecrow, with skin as pale as the moon, and eyes wise and weary like those of some old man. He was always complaining about how little money he had, which apparently compounded for him his physical miseries. She had known him for seven years, and had only recently come to understand his mood swings and fevers. Greer was fashionably unkempt, always in a tie and jacket, but mottled with sweat stains, and wrinkled; Lucy kept her hair up in a straw hat, and disliked all women. She also expressed a fear of water, which amazed one and all since every trip she took began with a journey across an ocean or down a river. Jan
e enjoyed talking with Greer as long as she didn’t have to second-guess his inordinate interest in children. She found Lucy to be about as interesting as a toothache.
The boatman wanted to be called Jim because of a movie he had once seen, and so after morning coffee bought at a dock, Jane said, “Well, Jim, we’re beyond help now, aren’t we?”
Jim grinned, his small dark eyes sharp, his face wrinkled from too much sun. “We make White Chapel by night, Nettie. Very nice place to sleep, too. In town.”
Greer brought out his book of quotes, and read, “‘Of the things that are man’s achievements, the greatest is suffering.’” He glanced to his wife and then to Jane, altogether skipping Rex, who lay against his pillows, moaning softly.
“I know,” Lucy said, sipping from the bowl, “it’s Churchill.”
“No, dear, it’s not. Jane, any idea?”
Jane thought a moment. The coffee tasted quite good, which was a constant surprise to her, as she had been told by those who had been through this region before that it was bitter. “I don’t know. Maybe— Rousseau?”
Greer shook his head. “It’s Hadriman the Third. The Scourge of Y-Cha.”
“Who’s Y-Cha?” Rex asked.
Jane said, “The Monkey God. The temple is in the jungles ahead. Hadriman the Third skinned every monkey he could get his hand on, and left them hanging around the original city to show his power over the great god. This subdued the locals, who believed their only guardian had been vanquished. The legend is that he took the skin of the god, too, so that it might not interfere in the affairs of men ever again. White Chapel has been the site of many scourges throughout history, but Hadriman was the only one to profane the temple.”
Lucy put her hand to her mouth, in a feigned delicacy. “Is it… a decent place?” Greer and Lucy spent their lives mainly traveling, and Jane assumed it was because they had internal problems all their own which kept them seeking out the exotic, the foreign, rather than staying with anything too familiar. They were rich, too, the way that only an upper-class Brit of the Old School could be and not have that guilt about it: to have inherited lots of money and to be perfectly content to spend it as it pleased themselves without a care for the rest of mankind.
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