“Yes,” she says simply. The growing dark morphs, disjointed forms taking shape. They creep across the ground, circle around us. Watching. Waiting.
“Can you love me?”
She touches her lips to my fingers, kisses them one by one.
“Yes,” she says.
I close my eyes, wait for the shadows. We will wander the earth together, our blood seeping back into the ground, payment for what we have been given. And we will call it love.
The Marking
Violet woke up with the bruises. Outside, the sky had turned dark. A hushed grey filled with pinpricks of blue fire, and the world tipped forward, a great dome that would suffocate her if she breathed too deep. This was how it had always been.
Six this time. Six places where the blood pooled too close to the surface, the sick, purpled mottling blooming across pale flesh. She was hungry, but she would not eat. Beneath, her bones pushed against wasted meat. It didn’t like when she went without food.
Her palm pressed tight against her chest, she traced her fingertips along her sternum, let them drift across the protruding rib bones. She counted them, wondered if with enough pressure, she could draw them out, release them from her thin cage of skin. If she did this, would it finally stop? Or would the marking linger on her decomposing body, a reminder even to the dirt that she was different, a thing separate?
Once, when she was a girl and the bruising had just begun, she’d found a slug and carried it home, her fingers aching from such a delicate touch. Later, she would eat it, taking small, neat bites. If she could fill her body with something else, something distinctly not Violet, perhaps the marking would pass over her, but the next morning the bruises had multiplied, and her mother smiled to see them.
How old had she been the first time? Five? Six? There were flashes of dark woods, the trees stretching jagged limbs against blackened sky, and the moon always absent. She could not remember it all. Hushed whispers, grunting. A great slab laid out before a hulking figure carved from stone. It would be years before she knew the correct word. Altar.
“Marked,” her mother said each time, her fingers tracing the marred flesh. Over the years, Violet learned to hate her mother’s touch, but she willed her body to hold still, to curl into itself, a small quiet thing in the face of her mother’s fever bright eyes.
At first she had asked questions, but her mother would go silent, her eyes twitching away, searching for something beyond the physical space they occupied. But at night Violet listened. She tiptoed through shadow to her mother’s room, pressed her ear against the door, and waited. If her mother ever dreamed of it, of the thing, its name never manifested. There was only silence in the great house, the rooms too large and menacing in their emptiness.
She would think of the woods then, those dark trees pressing down against her as she looked into the ancient stone face of something that had once worn the flesh of humans. But it had never been human. Even in her faded memory, Violet had the sense that it was much, much older than man. Older perhaps, than even her mother had ever imagined.
But she wasn’t a girl any more. Had not been, in fact, for many years. She had moved out of her mother’s house at seventeen, worked double shifts down at Fast Eddie’s to cover rent on a shitty one-bedroom apartment that smelled of cooked cabbage and cigarettes. Somehow, fifteen years passed, but the marking never stopped. Starving herself seemed to keep it at bay, but the markings had begun coming closer together. What had once happened once or twice a year was now happening once a month. Fear curved like a hard stone in her belly.
Outside her bedroom window, the dark gathered, stars blinking out one by one, until there was only moonlight, and then that too was gone. In the corner, a darker mass formed, and then the sound of fingernails scuttling across hardwood floors.
“Violet.” The voice filled the room, came from both beneath and above her. The shadow was on the ceiling now. Had it come from the window, or had it always been there, watching, waiting for her to finally notice its slow, calculated creeping?
“Hello, Mother,” Violet said, and the voice chuckled, a deep, rasping wheeze.
“Never could fool you. Always watching me with those big eyes. Like you were drinking the whole world with them.”
“I haven’t eaten, Mother. For a long, long time.” She offered up an emaciated arm.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Be a good girl and take off the blanket.”
For a moment Violet considered not obeying, thought about running from the room to her car and driving until the tank ran empty or until her organs finally shut down. Flesh and bone mangled up with steel and rubber. But it didn’t matter in the past. Certainly, it wouldn’t matter now, and there was so little of her left. She had made sure.
She kicked at the quilt that covered her, pushed it down so that her naked form lay exposed. Warm, fetid air wormed over the soles of her feet, up and across her thighs, the concave bowl of her belly.
“Flesh of my own. Blood of my own,” her mother said. The shadow was no more. Only her mother pressing against her, stretching her form to fit into Violet’s. Her dark hair flowing across Violet’s chest, spilling over her face. Their palms flat against one another, and then her mother’s mouth forcing her lips apart. She smelled of earth, something that had come from beneath the ground.
“Feed me. This last time,” she said.
* * *
They were in the forest. Breath coming in shallow bursts as they ran through the trees, branches tearing at their calves as they moved under a black expanse. Beneath them, stars burned, and Violet wondered if the world had come undone, if they had tumbled into the sky. Great white forms flitted in and out of the periphery, and the air lay heavy and damp in her mouth.
Her mother ran on all fours, her arms and legs impossibly long, the joints crooking upward. Violet wanted to scream, but she feared that if she did her mother would turn back, would look at her from a face that she didn’t recognize. The thought terrified her. She kept moving. She knew the way.
The great stone loomed ahead of them, and her mother slowed. She turned away. She did not want to see its face.
“Look at Her, Violet.”
Some animal cried out into the night, a long screaming that set her skin crawling.
“The Great Worm,” her mother whispered and crept forward, curled herself against its feet, ran her fingers between her legs.
The statue leered down, the body and face of a woman, the mouth opening impossibly large, rows and rows of pointed teeth crammed into the space. A vortex of razor blades that went on and on. It was a mouth of violence. A mouth that hunted out soft flesh and attached itself there, suckled until it was satiated.
“From the beginning, She wanted you. Marked you as Her own, and She paid me for bringing you. She let me see things.”
“Please. Don’t,” Violet said. She was so tired. She lay down, pressed her hands against the hard earth.
“There is a hole in the bottom of the world,” her mother panted, writhed under that gaping mouth.
“You know that moment right before you fall asleep? That moment where you can feel yourself falling? All that solid earth beneath you suddenly dropping away into nothingness? That’s the hole opening. You’re feeling Her move,” she said.
The stars blazed, a piercing white light that bored into Violet’s skull, burned ghostly images against her retinas. She clawed at her eyes, and her stomach heaved.
“And now, it’s time.” Her mother grasped at her, dirty fingernails pressing into pale flesh.
“Feed me, my love. My little daughter. Feed me now,” her mother said, pressed her mouth to her abdomen. An unnatural heat that pulsated in time with her heart grew under her mother’s tongue.
“It was you, wasn’t it? It was always you. The marking,” Violet said and wrapped her fingers in her mother’s hair, tried to pull her away. Her arm was so heavy, and her mother was too strong. There was only the movement of her mother’s mouth, the baring of teeth as
she suckled, the burning as blood rose to the surface.
“She’ll take me now. And the hole will open once more. Will open wide, and She’ll take it all, everything tumbling into that great void until She’s the only thing left. The way it once was. The way it should be. And I’ll stand with Her as the world implodes.”
Above them, the great stone eyes stared down, blank, unseeing orbs, and around them, all had fallen silent. Deep down, in the places where shadows slept, the world shifted, something great and powerful coming awake. Violet closed her eyes and let her hand fall from her mother’s hair. Her mouth tasted of blood.
“These are the small ways we die, Violet. Every day, another part of us rotting. Bags of meat and bone. But you have fed me, have fed Her,” her mother said, traced her tongue against Violet’s skin.
The mouth opened then, the rows of teeth gleaming an unnatural white against the grey stone. The eyes looked down at them, examined the two women lying in the dirt. One crouched before the other, arms and legs tangled together.
When the entire world began to scream, Violet opened her mouth to add her own cry in the dark. Everything slipping away, land bleeding into sky, and something vast creeping toward the surface. She did not want to see, so she shut her eyes, closed them tight as she had when she was a child.
“It was always you. I didn’t even know to hate you for it,” Violet whispered.
Violet’s heart fluttered against her ribs, a frenetic, broken pumping that hitched her breathing, left her gasping, her head a light, airy thing. For a moment, she floated, her body untethered from the earth, and she opened her eyes and saw.
Everything she had ever wanted. The large eyes of a small girl, her pale, fragile body stretched before Her, a vessel to fill. Rebirth. A doorway. And the dark haired woman so willing, so eager. She brought the girl, weakened her, marked her as Her own. And now, She would use the girl one last time.
“She never wanted you, Mother” she said and laughed. Whispered it again and again. She never wanted you. She wanted me.
“Of course She wanted you. From the very beginning,” her mother said, but Violet shook her head, the effort knifing through her.
“No. It was only me. Only me. I can see now,” she said. Above them, the blank orbs stared down, and the mouth opened impossibly wider.
“Too late. Too late,” Violet said, and her heart shuddered, the speed too much to bear. Once. Twice. As the moment came, she smiled. There would not be enough left. Only a pile of skin and bone, a smeared reminder of what she had once been.
And then there was nothing remaining. Only a mother clutching her daughter to her chest as she screamed into a world fallen silent.
The Long Road
“It’ll never leave you, Danny. Not now that you’ve heard them. Bet you can feel them itching down inside your guts. Bet you can hear them moving around out there at night. Sounds pretty, don’t it? Bet it gets your pecker hard just thinking about it.” Pop coughed, deep and wet in his chest, spit flecking gray stubble. He fumbled for the glass resting on the end table next to him, gulped at the brackish water he’d pulled from the marsh, smacked his lips and grunted.
“You thirsty, Danny?” he said, offering me the glass. I didn’t want to answer him. Because I wanted that water, wanted to take it deep into myself, cool the burning working its way through my belly and down into my groin. But there were things moving in the dark liquid, things made up of shadow and night. Things that bite and tear and eat. I couldn’t see them exactly. Could see only the outlines, the hint of fingers—or were they tentacles?—scrabbling, the slight high pitched hum of jagged teeth against glass, and I was afraid of those things burrowing inside of me, eating their way from the inside out. I shook my head.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
In the night, I tried not to hear them. The beasts that moved. Long, slow undulations beneath the reeds that made me think of fish whipping their tails. Only there had never been any fish here. Pop dragged Ma here when she was fourteen, her brown skin stretched tight over the seed in her belly, and tied her to this place of rot. It took fifteen years for the beasts to come. They found us and spoke their words, their voices honeyed, and the world turned inside out like an animal peeled out of its skin.
Pop was the first to listen to them. Walking the long road, he called it. He took to the water like an alcoholic takes to whiskey, and before long his insides started seeping out of him, his blue eyes turning black and oily. Then Momma disappeared into the night, and the beasts ripped the sky open with their shrieking, and I knew the devil moved in that water. It didn’t matter how much it burned, how pretty they sang, I wouldn’t drink.
My tongue dried against the roof of my mouth, and Pop dragged his finger along the glass, suckled at the last few droplets. “You’ll walk the road before too long, boy. And they’ll be there waiting on you. Sure as shit they’ll find you, crawl inside that pretty hide of yours, scratch that itch in your belly. Like the balm of fucking Gilead.” And he laughed, his jaw working loose from the skin, the smell of his decay rising, hot and liquid.
And I was moving out the door, letting it bang behind me like the way Momma would have once hollered that I wasn’t raised in a fucking barn, Danny. We got some manners in this family. Only there was no Momma any more, and I ran until my calves cramped, and I tumbled into the dirt.
Everywhere was the smell, the hushed whispers, and my skin blistering with the want, the need to drink of them. This is my body. This is my blood. The Holy Communion. The wafer and the wine. My body burning from the inside out, their voices scraping and sliding against my skin like claws and teeth hunting meat, but there was sweetness there, too, and the shame when I went hard, the shame when I pressed my body against the earth, spurting helplessly against the dust.
“Hard not to scratch that itch, ain’t it, Danny boy,” Pop said and moved beside me, knelt before the water, his hands twitching, dancing across the surface as the beasts unfurled, reached toward him. The fingers and hands of lovers.
He grinned. Like the cat who ate the canary, Momma would have called it. He had lost his molars, and he brought a finger against his right incisor, pushed and wiggled until the tooth fell into the dirt.
“Reckon I don’t need them anymore, huh, Danny boy? The pipes are fucking calling, and shouldn’t you be dead?” He paused, pushed against the left incisor until it too came loose then tossed it into the water.
“No, not you. But somebody you love. Somebody you love in the cold, cold ground, and you just keep on living, Danny boy. You’ll push your lips against her grave and whisper to the worms, and that itch will just keep on gnawing at you.” His eyes flickered, the darkness momentarily pulling away from something deeper.
Water leaked from my father’s eyes, his mouth, dripped from what remained of his teeth. His lips coated with dark viscous dribbling, and his skin seemed to rattle, loose around his bones. His mouth opened, a great yawning chasm, and I could see the beasts reaching from his throat, groping at his tongue, as if the things inside were trying to find their way out.
“Come on and walk the long road, Danny,” he said, and the things inside of him laughed, a deep gurgling that sounded like drowning.
And I ran.
* * *
§
* * *
I met Sarah ten years later. While there were miles and years between, at night I’d dream of the long road, the beasts, and the water. Wake up screaming in the darkness, the mattress sweat soaked and cold.
I’d taken another girl to see Tom Waits. A girl like all of the other girls, the names vanishing as soon as they spoke them. She had spent the night applying and reapplying her too pink lipstick. Every now and again her hand would brush against my crotch. Pathetic attempt at seduction. Her brightly painted face like something you could look through and see the broken parts. Buried things she covered with the sharpness of her hipbones, with the emptiness of her sex.
I told her I needed a cigarette, left her sitting there,
frowning at her own reflection mirrored in a lavender compact as she checked her lipstick once more. Vanity made flesh, and I moved away from her, through the sea of people into the spring night air that did not smell of salt but of pine.
Sarah was sitting on the curb, a dark sweater pulled tightly around her shoulders, the tip of her cigarette just barely illuminating the angles of her face. She looked frail, birdlike, as if I could gather her into my arms and grind her bones into dust. Her hair was cut short then, dark spikes tipped with crimson, the only color against her pale, clear face. She would tell me later that makeup made her feel like she was staring at the world from behind a mask, like what people saw was not really her but some approximation of her, a thing walking around in Sarah skin.
“So what are you running from?” Her voice startled me. I’d expected something light and airy, a voice to match the delicacy of her body, but the sound was deep and gruff. A voice steeped in long years of whiskey and cigarettes.
“I’m not running from anything.”
She turned to face me. Dark eyes framed by tangled lashes. “That’s bullshit, brother.”
“Guess I could ask you the same question.”
She inhaled sharply, laughed. “The same thing you are.”
“I doubt that.”
“See? So you do admit it,” she said and stood. She was taller than I thought she would be, and she crossed her arms across her chest. It was a protective gesture, a closing in that prevented physical closeness. Much time would pass before she would unfold herself, and even then, her arms would be hard, her embraces too tight as if reminding herself that yes, this is real, I have accepted this moment.
We both went quiet then, smoked our cigarettes in the darkness.
“See you around,” she said, flicked her cigarette into the bushes, and began a slow walk back to the building.
“What’s your name?” I called after her.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 7
