The fake leather couch and Ikea end tables had been pushed against the walls of the living room to create open floor space. Nathan had taken their sheets and pillows, draped and piled them into some kind of obscene fort where these men he did not know wrapped muscled arms around each other.
Nested in a mound of blankets, Nathan reached for him. His pupils were too large, a deep black threatening to drown the sclera. He didn’t want to see him like this. The other men reached for him, too. A knotted tangle of limbs and fingers grasping at his naked legs, his bare belly.
“I’ve been waiting forever,” Nathan said. Forever. The word hit him with the force of a bullet.
“I can’t. We can’t,” he said, but Nathan tossed his hair, laughed. Twain’s head swam, and the candle flame jumped, divided into two, then four, then hundreds of candles burning.
From the corner of the room, Cass came crawling, her mouth drawn away from her teeth. The gums had gone black, and Twain’s gorge rose in the back of his throat at the sight. He swallowed. Took a deep breath.
“Nathan. Please,” he said, and the girl wrapped herself around his legs, her fingers burning against his calf.
“Jesus, Twain. Lighten up. Always so fucking intense. Have a drink. Or, if you’re feeling frisky, Tyler here has something that will blow your goddamn mind.”
“Please,” he whispered, but Nathan drew him down among them. Mouths seeking the soft, exposed parts of him and the taste of apples on his tongue as he pushed them away.
Inside of him, the darkness moved, and he pictured tearing out the throats of the men with his bare hands, their yellowed skin withering beneath his touch. He would use their blood as a canvas; draw the King’s sign with his finger.
If Cass was still there, he could not find her among the mass of moving flesh.
Flashes of light blinded him. Nathan laughing. Nathan sleeping, his hands tucked beneath him like a child. Nathan holding him as he sobbed on the day his mother died.
He wondered if what the girl had given him would leak out of him, dribble from his lips like poison. If it was even possible for his bones to hold so much darkness. A pain so much like love. Everything and nothing all at once.
When he opened his mouth, the sky resumed its screaming. Whatever lived there, whatever dark angel or King or god, shrieked, and the darkness stole into the room. The entryway, the bottles, the kitchen, fading into a blackened nothing. The men shrieked and clutched at one another, scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go.
One by one, the other men were swallowed in shadow until only Twain and Nathan remained. And Cass. She crouched beside them, her tongue darting over her lips.
Wherever the others had gone, Twain hoped their skins would be peeled from muscle, their tongues torn from their mouths. Hoped their blood would feed the sky, pour into the moon’s ancient craters and carve strange sanguine rivers on the surface. And the King would drink and be satisfied.
“Twain. Oh, God. Oh, God. It’s happening, isn’t it? It’s fucking happening. Oh, Jesus.”
“What’s left now, Nathan? Here at the end. What’s left?”
“Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Fuck.” Nathan’s eyes were wild, beads of sweat appearing on his upper lip, his forehead.
“Why wasn’t it enough? Why wasn’t I enough? We could have gone into the dark together. One body. One flesh.”
He could smell Nathan’s fear, could feel the rapid beating of his heart quivering in the air. How much he wanted to take that delicate beating in his palm, cup it inside his hands to keep it safe.
“I’ve carried you inside of me. No matter how I try to starve you out, forget that you were ever there, you won’t leave. I never wanted anything else, Nathan. There was never anything else.”
The darkness hovered over them, waiting. The black just barely touching their legs, reaching for its brother that had curled inside of Twain. Soon, it would cover everything. They would never leave this place.
Still, the darkness drew nearer to them, covered their lower bodies like a mantle.
“I can’t feel my feet, Twain. What the fuck? I can’t feel anything.”
“She gave it to me. The sign. It should be so much easier now. You’re still inside of me. Still burning,” he said. He wanted to cry, but there were no tears left.
Nathan wrapped his arms around him, and Twain leaned into the man he loved, breathed in the smell of his skin, the feeling of his hands against his neck.
Around them, the sky gaped open, the darkness enveloping everything. The King returning to a world that had forgotten him, left him behind.
“I understand,” he whispered to the dark, to the abandoned King. He pressed his mouth to Nathan’s, breathed into him. One flesh. One heart.
Together, they waited.
To Sleep Long, to Sleep Deep
Simon had been gone for three days before the phone call came through. After, there had been the identification of the pieces of his body found in the woods, the immeasurable hours of questions in cold rooms with bitter coffee and a fat slug of a detective who eyed Nina’s cleavage like it was a piece of chicken he very much wanted to sink his teeth into.
“And you don’t know where he went after he left the residence?” the detective said, wiping a line of sweat from his upper lip.
“No. We fucked. He left. End of story,” she said, delighting in the sudden flush streaking up his neck, a sick red creeping against doughy flesh.
Even though they held her in that room for three days, nothing they had stuck, so they released her into a bright October morning that was uncharacteristically warm. She walked home along Hwy. 92, her legs unshaven but exposed in a too tight skirt, and ignored the honks from horny truckers or pissed off business women when she stumbled too far over the white line.
She liked the daring of it, the sharp wind as the cars went whooshing by. For a moment, it was almost like the first time, when Simon had found the book and brought it to her. Almost like the first time she’d read the words, and the thing that lived there had fought its way out and curled inside of her, slithered behind her eyes and spoken in a voice like jagged glass. It had hurt at first, but eventually, she could read the words without pain knifing through her belly, and at the end, before Simon took the book away, there had been heat between her legs, a low throbbing threatening to spill.
Simon had been jealous. Angry that the thing in the book had picked her instead of him. After all, he’d been the one to find it, the cracked leather binding hidden among cheap paperbacks at a used bookstore he’d happened upon in New York. No author listed, no title on the front cover. He’d told her that the salesman hadn’t recognized it but sold it any way when Simon offered him fifty on the spot.
He’d bought it for the illustrations. Full page, sepia-toned depictions of vivisections, bodies peeled open like ripe fruits while grinning devils lapped up spilled blood, or flies and maggots eating away at piles of intestines, the darkly gleaming insects so perfectly rendered Nina thought she could see them squirming. Once, when Simon had left her with the book, she touched each page to be sure, but there had only been ink. He spent hours with it, turning the pages slowly, trailing his fingers over the pictures, his mouth slack as saliva dripped from his chin.
His obsession with the macabre had never bothered her. She figured it was one of the few things he liked about her—the fact that she didn’t spew when he dragged her to splatter porn films or didn’t run screaming from the room when he told her that he’d always fantasized about doing it with a corpse. She’d learned that when it came to keeping her bed warm, it was better to go numb.
And then the thing in the book had spoken to her. It squirmed somewhere along her spine, like a spider twitching to life after a long, long winter, and suddenly she could read the nonsensical symbols. As she read, the markings and her thoughts tumbling against each other, the thing whispered, “Aren’t you tired, Nina?” and something in her came loose.
She could never remember what was written on the pages.
After she closed the book, her mind was dull, fogged, and she spent long hours trying to recall the words only to have them slip through her fingers. There was only the voice saying over and over “Aren’t you tired?”
She was tired. Tired of Simon stumbling into the darkness of the bedroom, the sharp tang of whiskey on his breath as he bit her lower lip. Always too hard. Always too rough. He liked to bite, to twist her arms behind her back until she whimpered against him, his taste in her mouth. Like salt. Like earth.
“Aren’t you tired?” the voice had said to her as Simon stared at the illustrations, his face bone pale, a slick of sweat shining on his forehead as he fought against a scream. He didn’t care about the words, only the terrible pictures, and she would look away when he came in his pants, his face contorted, his teeth bared.
She started to hate him. Wished he would go away and leave her alone with the book. He couldn’t even read it, didn’t know what it felt like for the thing to slip into his body, for the voice to speak to him. It could change her. It had promised. Change her so that she would never be tired again. Make her something new. Something strong.
When Simon slept, Nina would open the book and read until gray morning seeped through the windows. Her hair began to fall out in clumps. The skin on her back and shoulders grew rough and chapped, her fingers lengthening, the knuckles crooking upward.
When the book disappeared, Simon had told her she was obsessed, couldn’t control herself, and so he had sold it. But every afternoon Simon would leave the house for hours. “Running errands,” he’d said. After that, the voice went quiet, and two weeks later, Simon was found ripped to shreds in the woods, his body dripping into the spongy moss under a circlet of fir trees.
The blood did not appear until five days after the police sent her home. It came, painting the kitchen window in crimson gore, and she knew it was Simon. Day after day, she watched the window, waited for him to haunt her, but for weeks there was only the blood.
Then she heard him. His step always in the next room or just behind her, his breath hitching beside her as she slept, but when she turned, the sound evaporated, and there was a fluttering of pain behind her eyes in the place where the thing had once whispered.
Weeks passed, and the wash of blood slowed, faded from a deep, viscous smear to Valentine’s candy pink. Simon’s pillow was still cold despite the small curl of auburn hair placed just so against the thin cotton. A talisman, she thought, but not even the hair that she’d found after scouring their bedroom floor worked. She’d tried it all. A torn Ramones T-shirt thrown across her bed. His vinyl collection pulled out of the sleeves and scattered on the floor. The sluttish nightie he’d bought during their trip to Denver tossed in the corner as if in a hurried state of undress.
None of it worked. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t really loved him, that he had only seen her as pretty skin covering an empty, skittering collection of thought and emotion. “If you could just shut the fuck up for five seconds, you’d be perfect,” he’d told her, and she knew she’d become a statistic—the woman trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship, but she’d let him move in with her. Because he’d brought her the book.
Night bled into day. Her head began to ache. She couldn’t sleep. Could only sit by the window and watch.
“Where’s the book, Simon?” she shouted, but there was no response, only the silence of the house mocking her. He could not take it away. The book had spoken to her, had chosen her, but the harder she tried to draw him out, the rituals growing more involved and complex, the more he withdrew, until the window was wet only with rain, and the empty spaces inside her roared.
“Where’s the goddamn book?” she repeated over and over, a litany offered to a ghost. In the night, she sometimes heard him, the small noises he’d once made beside her, but when she held her breath, strained her ears against the quiet, she heard only the pulsing of her own heartbeat.
The night that she walked into the woods for the second time, it snowed.
“Here. Right here.” She drew a small circle with the toe of her boot.
“You fucker,” she hissed and pushed her fingers through the crust of snow to the dirt beneath, brought it to her lips. The grit lodged in her teeth. “I can still taste you. Your stench.” She spat, then shoveled more dirt in.
“Is this what you want? You want me here? Like I’m supposed to be sorry? You took it away, Simon. It wanted me.”
The fat detective had told her about the bite marks on Simon’s body, but they had been so jagged, so torn, they could not be identified as human or animal. They’d swabbed the skin for saliva, hoping for DNA, but the results had been inconclusive, pointed toward a strange hybrid of spider venom, dog saliva, and traces of semen.
From the cold spaces hidden in the forest, came a guttural, animalistic screaming that, for a moment, she thought was Simon finally materializing before her, but there was the taste of blood in her throat, and she realized that the sounds came from her. She grunted, pushed her face into the snow, rooted past the rotting leaves, dragged her tongue along the ground, tasting, searching for the book.
She’d followed him here that last night. Crawled on all fours, scrabbled beneath the brush so he would not see. Her eyes able to see in the dark, she’d watched him bury something, and there was the slightest stirring between her legs, the thing coming awake before slipping back into the black. The book. He had the book.
Even after Simon was dead, the exposed bones licked clean, she had not been able to find the book, had dug hole after hole until her fingernails peeled backward. Ashes to ashes, she had thought and cackled before pushing her face into the dirt, raked her hands back and forth, back and forth.
“Where is it?” she shrieked and clawed at her eyes, gathered fistfuls of hair and scattered the loose strands into the wind.
He was teasing her. She knew it. She could have been one of those haunted women, the kind they put on TV, pouring their grief into cameras and microphones as D-rate actors played out the romance of their hauntings. But in death, as in life, Simon wasn’t the romantic type. He wanted her to know he was there, that he would never show her where he’d left the book.
She writhed on the ground, her skin bloodied and chapped, the snow turning pink. She could not bear it.
Once more, she began to dig. When the flesh ripped away from her fingertips, she used her teeth, tore at the frozen earth. Slowly, the ground opened around her, swallowed her up as she went deeper, pushing mouthfuls of dirt past her gullet, gagging then swallowing.
Down there, in the bowels of the world, the voice waited for her. She licked her lips, tasted Simon in the grit and the sand and the roots. He could haunt her forever, but it didn’t matter.
She would have the book, and when she found it, the voice would fill her up, and she would rest. But first there was only the digging, only the taste of blood in her mouth as she pushed further on, further down.
The Fleshtival
“The Fleshtival,” Paul said, dark eyes shining from behind a smear of black hair that he hadn’t washed in four days. The city had cut water to his apartment on Monday, and fucking Vinnie wouldn’t have cash for him until tonight.
“Where the hell do you hear about shit like this,” Jake said, exhaled a mouthful of grey smoke, and handed the joint back to Paul.
Paul grinned, a mouth full of too white, too straight teeth. His dad was a dentist, and if Paul had nothing else, he had teeth like a fucking celebrity. “Somebody taped a flyer to my door.” He paused, reached onto the coffee table, and pulled the crumpled piece of paper from beneath a collection of beer bottles with the labels peeled off. A nervous habit Paul had never been able to shake. “A thousand bucks, and they roll out the red carpet. Read that shit, man. ‘Pussy for miles.’ I mean, they don’t call it the fucking Fleshtival for nothing.”
Paul took another pull from the joint, and held the acrid smoke inside of his lungs until he coughed, his stomach clenching around nothing. When was the last time
he had eaten? He’d spent his last roll of cash on the baggie that lay empty before them and a bottle of pills that Nathan said was Molly, but Paul thought was actually just a bunch of muscle relaxers his dealer had filched from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet. Well, fuck that guy. He’d taken four of the pills the night before, and fell into darkness unlike anything he remembered. If nothing else, those little pills gave him a one-way ticket to Dreamland and with the shit sleep he’d been getting lately, Paul would take what he could get.
“No way that this is real. This has hoax written all over it,” Jake said.
“Well, I’m going. Can’t win if you don’t play, right? I mean Jesus Christ, dude. Anything you want them to do, they’ll do it. Girl after girl after girl. Any fucked up little thing, they smile and ask if you want more than one of them to do it to you. At once. Says so on the flyer.” Paul waved the piece of paper at Jake’s stupid mug. “Can you believe it? And what’s the likelihood of something like this happening again ever in your fucking life, man? Twenty-two years old and still a virgin, and a goddamn fleshtival comes along, and you’re pussing out?” Paul squinted at Jake, reached out a finger and poked at the soft rolls of fat pouring over a pair of khaki shorts.
“Cut it the fuck out, Paul,” Jake said and swatted his hand away.
Grinning, Paul slapped him. Not hard. Just enough to let Jake know that he was only fucking around.
“Bitch tits. Don’t be a little bitch tits, Jake.”
“I fucking hate it when you call me that.”
“So don’t be a bitch tits then, you little fucker.”
Jake sighed. A deep, heavy sigh that let Paul know that he was giving in, and Paul gripped the joint between his teeth and smiled.
“So what happens when we get out there and this thing doesn’t exist?”
Paul took another hit, let the smoke fill him up. “I dunno, man. If it’s not real, you keep your money, drive back, and spend your Saturday night whacking it to old episodes of Law and Order. No harm, no foul.”
Everything That’s Underneath Page 3
