“Don’t come out, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”
The repeated phrase bothered her. She set down her fork.
“I’ve never seen you carve,” she said, and he glanced up at her then. Blue eyes cold and burning, and she immediately regretted intruding on this moment. He wanted to impress her. To show her that he wasn’t beaten yet, and here she was doing her best to fuck it all up.
“Of course. I’ll be here. Getting drunk. Maybe wandering around naked. You’ll be missing a good opportunity.”
He grinned at her, his eyes flashing, but then snatched up his hat, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, his breath sweet and cloying.
“There’s so much we can’t see. Everything that’s underneath. Hiding. But it wants us to see, to pull it out from where it’s sleeping and make it beautiful again.”
He was out the door before she could open her mouth.
* * *
How long had she been standing in the hallway? Benjamin’s words were still in her ear, swelling and bloating with impossible weight.
“Everything that’s underneath,” she repeated.
She’d come looking for some evidence, some sign to prove she wasn’t crazy. A groove carved into the floor, a hair, anything that justified the reality of the sound she’d heard in the night. Pulling herself onto her belly, she crawled along the floor, her cheek pressed against the wooden boards, fingers probing.
After an hour of doing little more than bruising her ribs from crawling along the floor, she gave up. It was when she turned out the light, in that brief flash, that she saw something. Each time she thought she saw more of the shape, but then she doubted herself. As soon as the light was on, she absolutely believed that it was nothing more than her eyes playing tricks, and so she flipped the switch off again, squinted into the growing dark.
The back door opened and closed, but she did not turn away, did not look back over her shoulder to see her husband creeping through the kitchen, his fingernails digging into the floor. Surely, he would be creeping. All of the things slumbering inside of him coming awake, waiting to be seen, waiting to be found in the dark.
“Come and see, Carin,” he said, and she flicked the light once more. On. Off. The shape did not move, but she could make out what looked like teeth. She thought she would laugh, or cry, or scream, but every sound stayed locked in her throat.
“Come and see the door. Come and see what I’ve found,” he said.
“I can’t. Please,” she said. If she followed him now, the world would come undone. All of the shadows would come to life and grow teeth. Bite and tear until there was nothing left.
“It’s so beautiful, love. Come and see.”
“Please, Benjamin,” she said, but somehow, her legs carried her forward. Her fear, hard and razor sharp, unfolded inside of her.
He waited for her on the back steps, his legs scrabbling across the wood like a spider’s, and led her out into the night.
It had begun to snow, but the flakes looked tinged with grey, as if night had stained their surface, and she swiped at her hair, afraid that somehow by simply touching it, the darkness would leak, like poison, into her as well.
She followed him past the row of camellias she had planted, past the vegetable boxes she had put to bed back in October. Her feet were freezing. She had forgotten to put on shoes.
There was no light in the shed, but she could hear him before her, that slow, methodical dragging.
“Benjamin?”
“Can you see it? The whole world opened up. Waiting.” His voice was high, breathy with excitement.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, to take in the massive cedar door Benjamin had built. He’d suspended it somehow—a series of ropes and pulleys—and it hovered above the ground. Strange wormlike shapes with round mouths and jagged teeth carved into the surface, their bodies tangling together in some kind of obscene orgiastic experience. Here and there a proboscis extended, probing into the chests of what appeared to be human torsos, the hands held up in supplication.
“So beautiful once you open the door and look. Once you really look. Like the wood. Waiting to be seen and touched. Then it opens you up, swallows down all of the sin and the hurt and the damage. You can’t imagine. What it’s like to be whole again.”
He stood then, his full height towering over her, his toes cracking as he extended his body into arabesque, laughing as he went en pointe. Something his body should not be able to do.
Behind her, came the sound of something pulling itself on hands and knees through snow.
The door really was beautiful. Deep amber tints that glowed without light. A color she could wrap herself in and forget this past year. All of the struggle and pain and doubt that she’d had in herself and her marriage. Wondering if she was truly strong enough to carry Benjamin—to carry the both of them—through a future that promised only loss.
“Don’t you want to open the door, Carin?” Benjamin said, and turned, his pirouette a quick, almost violent movement.
Benjamin’s lips did not move, but his voice came from behind her. A voice that belonged to deep earth and snow and dark. A gaping mouth waiting to take everything that had left her bleeding and raw.
“Something good,” she whispered.
Benjamin laughed, his body turning impossibly fast, moving into a blurred fouette. She had forgotten how to breathe. The smell of cedar everywhere.
Then, she laughed, too, and opened the door.
The Wicked Shall Come Upon Him
Twain met the girl on a night without stars. In the months leading up to her, darkness had bled from the edges of the heavens, blotting out what had once glowed with quiet, white light.
Before the sky had swallowed itself, the moon had bloated, heavy and full. Later, it turned a rancid yellow, and people closed their doors and curtains to avoid the moonlight.
It took two weeks for the moon to leak into people’s skins, turning it the color of something spoiled, rotted. An effect of the environment, the news said, and night after night, people drowned themselves with pills and booze in the hopes that they could ignore the screams pouring from the blackened sky.
People talked in low voices to each other, to themselves. Tried to dismiss their yellowing skins as a temporary effect of the moon’s shift, to brush off the screams as a seismic event. Every day another set of scientists on the television explained that eventually the moon would resume its natural pattern, but each morning, nothing had changed. The sun rose and shone without warmth. The night kept coming, and shadow spread like a blanket over the world.
Outside, under the darkness, people set fire to what they could find. Tore apart furniture. Couches and dining tables piled in front of their homes and set aflame. The darkness held at bay with weak, flickering light.
They fucked and sweated and pissed in the dirt. Hunted needles and injected confusion and chaos into their veins. A never-ending orgy at the end of the world.
Like rats, they found themselves outside, seeking the light of the many fires. This is where Twain saw the girl. Outside of the apartment building in the courtyard he came to sometimes smoke, her lanky body crouched before a tree, long dark hair twisted into dreadlocks tipped with blue. He watched her peel apples with a razor blade. Long strips fluttered and twisted underneath her hands as the edge bit against white flesh.
“You one of Nathan’s?” the girl asked him.
He didn’t like the easy nature of Nathan’s name in her mouth. Didn’t like the way she assumed that he was just another fuck. One of Nathan’s. The tone of her voice implying that he was nothing. He stroked the platinum band on his left hand, his fingers tracing the metal that covered the date inscribed beneath.
“We were married. Once. Before,” he said.
She nodded. “And now?”
“He wanted to throw a party. Outside. For the last time. Before whatever the fuck’s going to happen happens,” he said.
The words were husks, dead shells of what he
wanted to speak. He’d learned to swallow the sharp teeth of his love, and the silence he carried within him was the only thing that kept him from grasping the girl’s razor and drawing it across his throat.
“How do you know Nathan?”
“He’s easy to know. Everyone knows him,” she said.
She was right. It was why he had fallen in love with Nathan when he was nothing more than a child. A seventeen-year-old high school dropout in the big city. He’d haunted the bars, giving the bouncers blowjobs in trash-filled back alleys to get in. The knees of his jeans absorbing liquid runoff from the garbage bins and rats bumping against his shoes as he stared into the distance, tried not to focus on the sweating, heaving muscle in front of him.
He’d met Nathan at Mary’s on karaoke night, had watched him onstage growling out Tom Waits to a crowd screaming for him to take his fucking shirt off already.
Four bourbon waters later, he approached Nathan, screamed over the pumping music that Tom Waits sucked ass. To which Nathan laughed, called him a baby, and bought him another drink.
When the bar closed, Nathan pushed him into a cab, and they clawed at one another the entire twenty minutes to Nathan’s apartment. In the living room, Twain learned the movements of Nathan’s body, the taste of his sweat. He held it under his tongue, marveled at how love can blossom, hard and violent, like thorns shooting into the heart. Later, they spooned, Nathan’s pale skin standing in stark contrast with Twain’s dark, and Nathan had teased him. Sang “Ebony and Ivory” as he wrapped himself around Twain.
Nathan had a way of speaking that made you lean into him, like he was telling you a secret. Like you were the only two people in the world. Twain had leaned into him as they whispered to each other. He’d wished that he could burrow inside Nathan’s chest and plant himself so deep he would never be torn out and tossed away. They drowsed until morning light streaked through the windows over Nathan’s bed.
Twain fell in love with him that first night. Three weeks later, they stood before a Justice of the Peace, and Nathan swore to love him until their bodies crumbled into dust.
“I’m Cass,” the girl said, and Twain started. He had forgotten her presence there, and she smiled up at him, her lips pressed in a tight line.
He opened his mouth to speak, but a quick movement to the left drew his attention. Two nude forms tumbled out of the dark, their skins sallow and streaked in dirt. Nathan and a man he didn’t recognize, their arms draped over each other, the man whispering into Nathan’s ear. His breath would be hot, thick with whisky or wine, and Nathan would suck the words from his lips as if he were drawing the very essence out of him.
He swallowed. Watched the sky for something other than darkness, but there was nothing to see. Above them, the screams sounded again, a discordant melody of pain or hunger. Twain was afraid to know which.
When it had all began, Nathan disappeared for hours at a time. Came home reeking of smoke and liquor. On the night the moon vanished, Nathan had told him, “Why not have a good time while we can? Fuck who we want. Do what we want. Everything’s going to shit, Twain. Can’t we just live? For once in our lives, let’s just forget the rules and do what we want.”
“Fuck you, Nathan. If you bring anyone in here, into our home, I swear to Christ I’ll fucking kill him,” he’d said. He’d wanted to hit him. Wanted to feel Nathan’s blood under his fingernails and to know that it belonged to him. This blood was his alone, and he would tear apart anything that tried to take it from him. He would die before that happened.
The next week, their sheets breathed another man’s smell. All of the anger, all of the rage he’d felt the moment Nathan had told him what he planned to do melted away into a sobbing desperation.
He locked himself in the bathroom and swallowed the first bottle of pills he could find. Aspirin, it turned out. He thought his stomach had turned inside out, and he’d shit his pants, but his heart kept pounding in his chest. Nathan had not been there to hold it in.
Despite everything, he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
“If I carve your name, carve The Sign, into one of these, you’ll fall in love with me.” Cass twitched the razor toward the apples under her boots, and grinned. Her teeth were stained red.
“Wine?”
“What’s that?”
“Red wine. Bitch of a stain.”
“Should I do it? Should I cut your life into mine, Twain? Make you forget him? Forget the sound of your name in his mouth; the weight of his hand against your chest? All of your learned routines. Gone. Poof. Like smoke. You would be happy again.”
Somewhere in the dark, Nathan laughed. He could no longer tell the sound from the screaming.
“How much more? How much more do I have to feel before there’s nothing left?” he asked Cass. She shrugged her shoulders.
There was too much space in this new world the darkness had created. The fire casting a scant glow, and all of the shadowed things that lived beyond the haloed light stretching toward them, mouths gaping and hungry. Too many empty places where silence echoed through the words Nathan spoke.
Every day, other people drew their yellowed skins around them, cocooning the soft, fragile bits. All so they wouldn’t see, wouldn’t expose their raw, bleeding hearts. So they could ignore the empty sky and the possibility of whatever came next.
He could have done the same. He had tried. But Nathan would touch him, would tousle his hair, and he found himself confused and suffocating in what had been their love.
Cass picked up another apple, traced the blade over the surface, her fingers appearing to shimmer. The blue fire of stars under her fingernails. He blinked, and the light vanished. She dipped into the apple. Began to carve.
“Why do you think it screams? The sky?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“The sign. The Tattered King. He pours his dark over the world. Prepares us for his return from death. And it will all fall upon us. All of it.”
Her words woke something inside of him, and his stomach twisted into knots. Strange to be frightened of the words spoken by a girl he didn’t even know, but the fear grew all the same.
“Twain! Come the fuck on already. Everybody’s waiting.” Nathan’s voice seeming to come from everywhere at once. He thought the sound would tear him open. He couldn’t breathe. The sky bore down, the screams pitching ever higher.
“Everything devours itself. Lust. Hate. Love. We burn and burn until there is only ash, and then we eat what remains. Carry it inside of us like a secret. Until it grows into something else.” She brought an apple to her lips, bit down. Red teeth. White flesh.
He shuddered. Turned in the direction of Nathan’s voice. He would take one of Nathan’s pills. Chase it with whisky or vodka or absinthe. Forget the girl and the sky and her strange mentions of signs and dead kings. Forget the cold fear that had crawled up his spine when Cass spoke. Forget Nathan sweating and grunting against someone else. Forget the way Nathan had looked at him the day they met.
“So easy to do. To slip your fingers under the skin of love. Tug until it drops away. Show everything that lives underneath. All the broken little things,” Cass said and took up another apple. Her wrist flicked. A small movement, and he felt himself tipping forward. An abyss yawning before him.
“The King has sent his sign. He will satisfy all of us. Give us what we need. Make us forget. Aren’t you hungry, Twain?”
To forget. To have never known Nathan. To have his memory erased. To forget the pain of Nathan laughing, his head leaned against another man’s chest. Forget.
“What happens if I say yes?” he asked her, and she stood—she was taller than he’d imagined—and pressed her lips to his. Her tongue was sweet, and he gagged.
Still, he opened his mouth wider to accept what she gave him. He closed his eyes, and dark stars blazed behind his lids. The moon glowed crimson. She poured the sky’s screams into him, and they burned. Burned away everything. Bright and clean.
He didn’t
know when the girl pulled away, only that she had gone, the apples piled beneath his feet, her taste still in his mouth. The fire that Nathan had started had gone out, and the darkness licked at him. Filled him to the brim. He took off his shirt, his pants.
“Twain! What the fuck are you doing out there?” Nathan called, his voice floating from the entrance to the apartment building at his back.
He shouldn’t still know that this was Nathan’s voice, should he? Shouldn’t feel the sudden need to move toward the sound, his feet finding their way back, his heart quickening. She had promised. This supposed King had promised.
They lived on the ground floor of an apartment building that had been mostly abandoned. Vast rooms that carried only the ghosts of those who had once lived there. Family portraits still hanging in entryways; a pair of green rain boots left outside the door of 1406; an empty crib pushed against a bare window, a ragged stuffed elephant still inside.
He’d seen people packing, seen them loading cars with boxes, trash bags stuffed with clothing, but he could not remember their faces. These people who shared his walls nothing more than a wisp of memory.
Those who remained drifted in and out. Vague, amorphous shapes that he avoided when he encountered them in the lobby or the hallways, head down, eyes averted. If the others did the same, he didn’t know.
He walked into the apartment now, found Nathan in the center of five men. All blonde. Smooth. Hairless. So much the opposite of Twain with his dark skin and dark eyes and thick hair that covered his arms and chest. So much the thing Nathan never claimed to want.
The entryway, lined with cheap Fuseli prints, opened to the living room, the tiny kitchen to the right. The refrigerator stood open, and bottles lined the countertop where a lone candle sputtered and cast shadowed devils against the ceiling. The air was stale and laced with the acrid smell of something faintly chemical.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 2
