Candlelight flickered against black dirt, weak flame lit from somewhere deep within the bowels of the earth, and he watched the light trace ghost-like patterns across the packed soil. So much like the stains on the wall that pretended to be a house. He almost giggled again, but the girl’s tight, bouncing ass kept the noise locked behind his teeth.
The stairs curved to the right, were cut deeper and narrower here, and Paul had to turn his body sideways, creeping along at a snail’s pace just so that he wouldn’t bust his ass or break something on the way down to wherever the fuck they were actually going.
Jesus Christ, he wished the girl would stop already, but she just kept going, and he started to wonder if this was hell, and he was going to spend eternity walking down a set of stairs that led to fucking nowhere, but she stopped ahead of him and turned left, disappearing around a bend.
“Follow me,” she said again, and Paul stretched out his hands to feel for the walls, stomped his feet against the dirt. Sure enough, the stairs had stopped, and he followed the curving path. Here the light grew brighter, and he hurried toward it, catching a glimpse of the girl rounding yet another corner.
Dragging his fingers through the loose soil, he pushed his frustration to the back of his mind. Surely this was part of the buildup. Some kind of weird way of getting paying customers all hot before unleashing an ungodly amount of pussy. A sales tactic. Delaying the pay off. Oldest trick in the book. Same way that dealers got people into harder shit. Sell the weak stuff first and then tell them you have something that will blow them away. The tease and the reveal. He was in the tease now. All he had to do was wait for the reveal, and there had better be a perfect pair of tits he could squeeze and then fuck at the end of all of this.
The corner opened back up, a smooth tunnel of dirt stretching on and on, but he didn’t see the girl anywhere. Only that dim light and the deep earth pressing in on him, and he licked at his lips, which burned, and tasted of salt and beneath that, something fetid.
“Hey,” he called out, and his voice echoed back to him. He waited for the girl to re-appear, that pale skin glowing, but she did not.
Nothing to do but keep going. Nowhere to go but forward.
Even still, he felt stupid stumbling around in the dark like some sightless mole pushing his way toward nothing. No, not nothing. There would be a pay off at the end of this, and the thought made him hurry.
Around yet another turn, the path opened up into a series of vast rooms. Wide, arched openings stretched before him, and he moved past them, glancing inside as he went, but the rooms stood empty. No furniture. No beds. Nothing to indicate that anything had ever existed down here.
Who the fuck carved all of this shit out anyway? Someone had taken the time and the care to dig out some kind of massive, underground fortress, and it struck Paul that only an absolute nut job would do something so extensive for so little purpose.
Unless, whoever organized the Fleshtival had done it. Part of the appeal, but even still, it seemed like an awful lot of work for something that could have been done in somebody’s basement or a rented house for just as much money. Hell, that was how porn worked, wasn’t it?
His feet hurt. How long had he been walking? He pulled his cell phone from his pocket—no service, of course—but the digital clock told him that it was almost four in the morning. He and Jake had started driving at ten. He had lost at least five, maybe six hours.
“No fucking way,” he said and checked his phone again. Half past five in the morning. He blinked at the screen.
Up ahead, someone laughed—a soft tittering—and he put his phone back in his pocket. The stupid thing was messed up. That was all. He’d get it sorted out when he got back home. Another voice joined the laughter, a husky whisper that made his cock twitch, and he smiled as he came around one last corner.
The corridor opened into what looked like an infinite cavern. Here and there, small niches had been carved into the dirt, and they stretched upward into a darkness that swallowed everything down.
Women lay inside of the hollowed out areas of earth, long legs that draped over the sides, or arms that reached out to trace careful designs in the air, their mouths forming unspoken words behind bared teeth.
“Hello, Paul. We’ve been waiting. For such a long while.” The girl who’d led him into the hole stood before him, and he licked at his mouth, shuddered as he felt his bottom lip split, blood spilling over his teeth.
“You left me,” he said and hated the way that he sounded. Like a bleating, mewling schoolboy who’d shit his pants and needed his mommy to clean him up.
“No. We found you. Haven’t you felt us? Like blood, like a stain, spreading over everything. We were there with you. Before you came to us,” she said and drew him forward.
The women looked down from their holes at him, that same birthmark covering their cheeks or blotting out their eyes.
One of them leaned over and pulled her hair over her face so that he could not make out her features, and the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps there was no face behind that veil of dark hair, and he shuddered.
Above him, the darkness seemed to grow thicker. He could have sworn that he saw more of those little slots when he entered the cavern, but there seemed to be fewer now, and another woman—this one another blonde with mud streaked through the white strands—turned to him, her hands pulling her hair over her face as she did so.
One by one now, the woman tugged at their hair, covered their faces, and he whimpered, tried to drop the woman’s hand, but she held on, her skin burning hot against his.
The room had certainly grown darker. Paul could only make out two, maybe three rows of those neat little holes.
“Listen, lady. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but I left my buddy in the car. He’s waiting for me, and if I don’t come back, he’s going to call the cops, and you better believe that they’ll light this place up like the fourth of fucking July.”
“No. He’s gone now. He was gone the minute he came looking for us.”
She turned to him them, those blonde curls hanging over her face.
He couldn’t help it. He screamed.
When the darkness dropped over him, he tried not to listen to the sounds of skin scraping over dirt, the heavy breathing of those faceless women crawling. Tried not to feel their hair as it moved over his face, his chest; their fingers opening him up.
“We’ll pluck out your bones and drain you dry,” one of the women said, and the others sighed and moved over and inside of him, delicate hands and mouths creeping hot and sticky over his chest, his groin.
He drank of the darkness. The women fed him with their mouths, and he squirmed inside the dirt, everything melting away, and they wrapped him with gentle hands, guided him further into the ground, the soil soft and cool against muscle and bone.
“These are the ways you die. Learn them well. Take them into your mouth, your stomach. Let them swim in your blood. Some are punished. Some are not,” one of the women said, and he opened his mouth to them, but they offered him nothing else.
For a long while, he cried. And then, he didn’t.
The Beautiful Nature of Venom
When we met, you whispered in my ear, your breath hot, wet, and heavy with whiskey, that you wanted to know the feeling of my skin under your fingernails. There was lace around the collar of my dress, and I wanted you to take hold of it, rip it off of me, take my skin with it. Then you would see the spiders that live under my skin, the knife points of their legs splayed open like desperate women.
I turned away from you even though you couldn’t see them. I wanted you to see them, wanted you to feel them slice through you from the inside out.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” you said and laid a finger along my collarbone. Under my skin, the spiders traced the tips of your fingers.
“They’re memorizing you,” I said, but you didn’t hear me.
“You want to g
et out of here?” you said, and I nodded. The spiders pushed against my skin, an obscene blooming in the darkness, and I brought my hand to my stomach, pushed their dancing legs flat.
“None of that prude bullshit for you,” you said as we walked, and I let the clack, clack, clack of my heels answer you. The spiders settled against my stomach, their legs fluttering like fans.
We walked slowly, and you wound your fingers in my hair. I like to think you felt them then because as they shifted under my scalp, you pulled backward, and I let a sigh escape.
“You like it rough, huh?” you said and looped my hair around your fist, pulled it towards you, exposing my neck.
“Back there,” I said. Inside of my throat, the spiders threatened to split through my windpipe, but their sudden movement only jerked my head towards the empty alley just behind you.
You grinned, and your mouth was all wetness, your teeth covered by the slick velvet of your tongue. The spiders flooded my mouth now, clattered across my teeth.
I let you pull me into the alley, let you yank up my skirt. Your hands were rough, calloused, and they pulled at my skin. I could feel everything pulling away; skin from muscle, muscle from bone, and the spiders were singing, pushing against my broken flesh as you fumbled with your belt, your zipper.
Your fingernails pushed into my back, and I parted for you like the folds of tissue paper. If you held me up to the light, I would be translucent, a milky image of myself.
“Shit,” you said and pushed deeper, and I stretched around you, my insides bulging as the spiders rushed towards you, their sighs whistling out from between their fangs. A sound so slight, so lovely, that I wanted to cry.
“Do you hear them?” I said, but your movements had become jerky, your breathing labored.
I wanted them to make you slow down, wanted them to let you hear them singing, but they could not. They were too busy. My skin swirled with the pinprick designs of their legs searching for an opening. I had become like a piece of lace, delicate and airy.
“I feel beautiful,” I whispered to you as you finished, your fingers full of my skin.
“Fuck,” you said and you leaned your head against mine. Your sweat smelled sweet, and I brought my tongue to your cheek.
My own cheek burst open, and the spiders poured out, a beautiful glittering army in the night.
When you saw them, you smiled. For that, I think I loved you.
Like Feather, Like Bone
The little girl is under my porch eating a bird. Her hair is matted. She did not bother to push it back before she began, and blood has clotted against the white strands. I try to ignore her, but she is crunching its bones, and the sound is like the ground cracking open.
I creep under the porch, squat near her, but not too near. She still has her milk teeth, and they are sharp, a tiny row of pointed knives. Small feathers cling to her heart-shaped face.
“You shouldn’t do that, sweetheart. It isn’t good for you,” I say.
“I want wings. Wings the color of the sky,” she says and slurps at the bird’s eyes.
“What’s your name, darlin’?”
“Momma said I don’t have one. But your name is Caitlin.”
“How do you know my name?” I say, but the little girl shakes her head.
“It’s a secret,” she says and licks her hands, her small pink tongue darting in and out of the spaces between her fingers where the blood has dripped.
I feel I should take her inside; put her in a hot bath, wrap her in the thickest, fluffiest towel I can find, but it’s her mouth that keeps me from taking her in my arms and carrying her into the house. She gobbles down a slimy string of meat, and I look away.
“Where’s your Momma?”
“Under the water, under the water,” she says, and her voice lilts up and down as if reciting a nursery rhyme. My skin blossoms into goose flesh despite the warmth of the late September afternoon.
“She went under the water. Like your Jacob. The sky doesn’t go in the water. I want to be like the sky.”
I haven’t said his name in six months. Not since Colin left.
I pretended to listen as he spoke. “I’m sick of your fucking judgment, Caitlin. Like losing him didn’t tear me open. Like you’re the only one allowed to mourn. My boy. My baby boy in the goddamn ground, and I kept thinking that it wasn’t right for him to be down there in the dark. He would be scared. Cold. It isn’t right. I can’t do it, Caitlin. I can’t. ” he had said. But I was happy when he left. He didn’t know what it had been like to find Jacob, his eyes glassy, unfocused, his skin blue, his mouth filled with water.
“Jacob,” I say and my mouth is full with the sound of his name. The little girl cocks her head, watches me, her eyes glinting in the shadows.
“Do you want wings, too?”
I think of the heaviness of Jacob’s body when I pulled him from the water, my fingers scrabbling through his hair, dipping inside his mouth as if I could pull the water out of him.
I kneel beside the girl and watch her pluck the feathers from the bird. She gathers them in her hand one by one, and she laughs. It is like music, and I am so tired. I lie down in the dirt. It is cold and damp like the fistful of earth I placed on top of Jacob’s small coffin.
The little girl hums, her voice high and quavering, and arranges the feathers around me. Her fingers are streaked with blood, but I do not care, and she places the feathers in my hair, tests their color against my eyes until she is satisfied. She pats my cheek, and her hands are sticky.
“There. Now you’re like a bird, too,” she says and resumes her song. Her voice is delicate, fragile, a thing I could take in my hands and crush. So much like Jacob’s cold hands, tissue paper skin stretched across bone. So easily breakable.
Something flutters at my feet. A small sparrow hops toward us, its beak opening and closing.
“You’re calling them,” I say, and she snatches the bird, watches it wriggle against her grip before snapping its neck. The sound seems to echo against the slats of the porch, fills up the space. I think of screaming, but if I start I’ll never stop.
She grins, her mouth all teeth and gore, and holds out her hand. The bird is still. I want to take it from her, breathe life back into it, but I remember Jacob, my mouth working to push air into his still lungs.
“Look,” she says and turns, lifts her shirt to expose bare shoulders. “You see? It’s working.”
Dotted against smooth flesh are small bumps, dark specks against pale skin. Tiny feathers beginning to sprout.
Something sharp gnaws at my stomach. I am hungry. So, so hungry, and the girl turns back to me, places the sparrow near my mouth.
“Don’t you want wings?” she says, and her voice is Jacob’s voice. There is a roaring in my gut, an aching screaming to be filled, and I take the bird in my hand, bring it against my lips. It is so small. I do not think it will be enough.
“I can get more,” she says. Behind her, small wings the color of the night sky unfold, flutter for just a moment before settling.
I bare my teeth, press them against warm flesh, tear at the soft feathers. It burns as I swallow. The little girl sits with me, sings her song into the growing night. Beneath my skin, my bones shift, and the dead make room for something new.
Worship Only What She Bleeds
The house bleeds at night. I know not because I have seen it but because I can hear it. The blood moving through the walls, a singular drumming heartbeat that presses against me, fills me up to the point where I think I might scream. But I don’t. It wouldn’t matter. The blood comes no matter what I do.
Momma tells me that there’s no such thing as bleeding houses and that she ought to whip me for sneaking and watching The Amityville Horror even after she told me not to, but her ears are old, and she can’t hear it. Not the way that I can. Every night the house pours itself back into the dirt. The blood finding its way home.
Even more than the sound there’s the smell. A hot, metal smell. Like in the back
of your throat in winter when you’ve been running and can feel all the raw parts of you exposed and open. It makes me sick. Plenty of mornings I wake up dizzy, my stomach heaving and rolling. Momma gets me on the bus anyway. Even the morning I threw up because the smell had found its way inside my throat. “Stop being so dramatic, Mary,” she said, and tucked me into my green raincoat.
“A daddy would fix it. They fix things,” I told her last night.
“You don’t have a daddy anymore.” She wouldn’t look at me after that, picked at her bowl of lettuce and cucumber for an hour before tossing it in the garbage. Later, when I should have been asleep, I watched her pluck out her eyelashes one by one, transparent half-moons drifting toward the ground as she watched the mirror, her eyes unfocused, distracted. The blood roared through the house, and the stink rose, but she still didn’t notice. I fell asleep watching her hands rise and fall against her face, the violence she committed there a small, quiet thing. In the morning, I don’t ask her about it, and she doesn’t mention that she found me out of bed, and we eat our toast in careful bites.
“I think,” she begins but stops. She wipes at her lips with the back of her hand. A smear of red jam lingers in the corner, and she brings the same hand to my forehead, huffs as she sits back down, her swollen belly bumping the table. I think of the baby there, floating in the quiet dark. I wish I could trade places with him.
“You’re warm,” she says. She doesn’t look at me, and her eyes are strange without their lashes, too big and wet, like massive pools of murky water threatening to spill over the shore line. A red scab has formed over her right eyebrow, and she scratches it, her fingers scrubbing against flaking skin.
“I don’t feel warm,” I say, but she shakes her head, her mouth turning down at the corners.
“You’re sick. Very sick. A very sick little girl,” she mumbles and scratches again at the scab. It looks bigger now, the size and color of a strawberry.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 5
