Cath stirred beside him and then he felt her stare on him. He could always feel her gaze, like a physical touch, like a brush dipping into him, drawing something from him. Is that how you do it, Cath? How you take the thing you take? Capture it in your eyes, then cage it through your fingers onto the page? Have you been feeding on me too?
‘I’m still hungry,’ Cath said. Her voice was small, almost childlike in the dark.
He knew what she meant. ‘We’ll hit town soon,’ he said. But it would be three in the morning when they arrived. No one around. No one to draw. And she had no pictures left. Cath said nothing but looked away. After a while, he figured she was asleep. Then he felt her stare again.
‘I don’t want to hurt people, Joe.’
He swallowed. This was new. She never talked about it, even when Joe did. He should say something now, something smart, something that would lead them out of this. He should but he had nothing left to say. He could only nod. ‘I know, babe.’
‘It just gets so hungry. I get so hungry.’
‘I know.’
‘I can’t stop it. It keeps pulling me, making me . . .’
Joe could feel her pain in those words. And his fear.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘So tired I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up. Ever been that tired, Joe?’
Joe swallowed again. All the time, he thought, but he just nodded. Cath looked away and he took a breath as if he was coming up for air.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said again.
‘I know.’
Her stare settled on him again like a beast on his chest.
‘I could draw you, Joe.’
Joe’s hands tightened on the wheel. Cath had said it the way a kid told you she could ride a bike or tie her shoe. The lines flashed by in the headlights. White on black, no red.
‘Don’t even need to see you,’ she said. ‘Know you so well.’
Joe stared at the road. Don’t look, he thought.
‘Know your face like I know my own,’ she said.
The burden of her gaze lifted. He looked at her.
Her eyes were shut and her hand moved in her lap, mimicking drawing motions. ‘Don’t even need light. Could draw you with my eyes closed.’ Her hand stopped and she leaned her head back. A few minutes later, Joe could hear her breathing slow and deepen.
So there it is, he thought. He always knew it would come to this. This was why he had stayed, even after he learned what Cath did, what she was. Afraid that when he left, when Cath no longer needed him, she would draw him down. Draw him down onto the page from memory, then drink him in like all the others.
The road lines flew at him like white knives out of the night. White knives and blackness. Just the blood red missing. Taking a hand from the wheel, he felt inside the top of his boot, running his fingers over the bone handle of his switchblade.
A few miles down the road, he found a wide shoulder and pulled over, turning off the engine and the lights.
Cath still slept. Hands shaking, Joe pulled the knife from his boot. It’s self-defense, he thought. But he just sat holding the knife. It was for the best. How many more would she kill? But he still loved her. Could he do it? He was tired, so tired. He leaned back. He only slept now when Cath did, when he didn’t feel her stare. He closed his eyes. Her breathing brushed his ears, soft and deep, soft and deep, soft . . .
Joe awoke to the sound of scratching on paper. He looked over. Framed against the moonlight, Cath sat hunched over her sketch pad, her hand moving in short, sure strokes.
‘Kind of late for drawing, isn’t it, Cath?’ Joe asked. His throat was dry. He fumbled in his lap for the knife.
‘Hungry,’ she said, her voice barely audible.
‘Dark, too,’ he said, blood pounding in his ears.
‘Don’t need light. Drawin’ from memory,’ she whispered.
Drawing from memory. Drawing him. He knew she was drawing him. ‘Don’t, Cath.’ His thumb found the blade’s button.
‘Tired of being hungry.’ She sat back, her gaze on the sketch.
Joe couldn’t see the picture, but he saw the red crayon in her hand. She’d finished the mouth. ‘Please, don’t do it,’ Joe said. His cheeks felt cool and wet. Joe realized he was crying.
Cath lifted the paper to her face. She was crying too.
‘Don’t!’ Joe screamed. The knife blade clicked open.
‘Bye, Joe. Sorry.’ Cath breathed in through her lips.
Joe saw a pale wisp rise from the paper and move toward her mouth. Saw his hand gripping the knife flash forward. Saw the blade slice her white T-shirt and slide between her ribs.
Saw the red, the blood red, flow over the white of her shirt to blend with the black of the night and the shadows.
Cath spasmed and fell sideways onto him. Surprise mixed with peace in her face. ‘Thanks . . . Joe,’ she whispered. Her eyes closed and her head slumped back. A wisp of mist escaped her lips. That’s me, Joe thought. Sobbing, he pressed his lips to hers, sucking in the breath and the grey mist from her mouth.
Bitter and sour, the thing burned his throat as he breathed it in. Something was wrong. Joe felt a presence of something dark, something . . . hungry.
His head spinning, Joe flicked on the dome light. Blood soaked into his shirt where Cath slumped against him, the picture still clenched in her hand. Joe stared at the sketch, a scream forming in his mind.
A familiar face stared back at him from the page, a face that Cath knew from memory. The face she knew best of all.
Not Joe’s face.
It was Cath.
She hadn’t been drawing him. She’d been feeding herself to the thing that had lived in her. Cath had been killing herself.
The emptiness that was the mouth in Cath’s pictures gaped beneath him and Joe felt himself being drawn down.
* * * *
Lost to you, what might have been . . .
A February evening, St. Pete’s Beach. Joe sat on his stool, his back to the beauty of a Gulf sunset. His portraits lay strewn on the sand around him like the dead on a battlefield. A woman and man looked them over while Joe waited. The woman held the hands of a little girl and a boy. Twins, Joe guessed. Kids couldn’t be much more than seven, he thought. He remembered when that would have meant something to him, before Cath died, before . . .
The little girl tugged on the mother’s hand. ‘They all look so sad, Mommy.’ The mother hushed the child while the father haggled with Joe over the price. The day had been slow, so Joe agreed to do both kids for the price of one.
Joe started sketching. His hand leapt over the paper, and the images of the children grew around the emptiness where their mouths should have been. A tear ran down his cheek, but he kept drawing.
He had to. He was hungry.
<
* * * *
POPPY Z. BRITE
O Death, Where Is Thy Spatula?
PoppyZ. Brite has published four novels:Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse and The Lazarus Heart. She has had two short-story collections published, Wormwood (aka Swamp Foetus) and Are You Loathsome Tonight? and a collection of non-fiction, Guilty But Insane. She also edited two volumes of the erotic vampire anthology Love in Vein.
Wrong Things was a recent collection with Caitlin R. Kiernan, and she has two novels forthcoming, The Value of X and Liquor. Brite lives in New Orleans with her husband Christopher, a chef.
‘ “O Death, Where Is Thy Spatula?” is the second in my series of stories about my alternate life as Dr Brite, the coroner of New Orleans,’ explains the author. ‘This was my earliest career ambition, but unlike Dr Brite, I doubt I could have made it through the organic chemistry courses in medical school.
‘The exquisite cuisine of Devlin Lemon was inspired by many New Orleans restaurants, including Marisol, Lilette, Gerard’s Downtown, Dante’s Kitchen, and Commander’s Palace under the late chef Jamie Shannon, for whom the story was written.’
* * * *
T
HE MAIN THING YOU NEED to know about me is that I love eating more than anything else in the world. More than sex, more than tropical vacations, more than reading, more than any drug I’ve ever tried. I’m not fat - I’m actually quite slender - but I can’t take credit for any kind of willpower or exercise regimen. The truth is, I’m not fat because I only finish eating things that are really, really good, and there just aren’t that many of them in my opinion. I love eating, as I say, but I’m picky as hell. A French pastry, ethereal manifestation of butter, custard, and chocolate, designed like a little piece of modern architecture? I’m there. A slice of cold pizza? I might nibble at it until my hunger headache goes away, but no more.
So, for the tale I’m about to relate, this food-love is the central fact of my being. I have a job (coroner of New Orleans), five purebred Oriental Shorthair cats, a mixed-breed husband (Irish and Jewish; wire-haired; his name is Reginald, but I never thought that suited him, so I call him Seymour), a house, and a hell of a lot of books, but none of that is terribly important here. What’s important is that you understand how much I love to eat.
All right - the fact that I am the coroner of New Orleans is somewhat important too, but I don’t want to put you off right away. Just store that information for future reference.
People think New Orleans is a world-class food city. Possibly it is, but only in a very narrow sense. There’s a saying that we have a lot of great food but only about five recipes. Gumbo - etouffee -jambalaya - oysters Rockefeller - and I don’t even know what the fifth one is supposed to be. Maybe breaded, deep-fried seafood, because we certainly have plenty of that. I see arteries full of it on my tables every day.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. There are, in fact, a lot of good restaurants here. But most of them… well, did you ever see that episode of Frasier where Frasier asks Niles, “What’s the one thing better than a flawless meal?” and Niles answers, “A great meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night’? Most of the places here are like that, except the flaws aren’t tiny. I can easily think of twenty places with excellent appetizers, terrific entrees, and dessert lists dull enough to plunge me into despair (apple tart, bread pudding, the eternal Death By Chocolate). There’s a good French restaurant on Magazine Street where, even though I always pay with my credit card, the waiters refuse to acknowledge my existence - ‘May I clear that for you, sir?” they say, gazing lovingly at Seymour as they whisk away my salad plate. There’s a simple neighborhood place where they used to have perfect fried chicken livers, but they hired a new fry cook, and now (no matter how I beg) the lovely little livers resemble nothing so much as deep-fried pencil erasers. I don’t even want to talk about who and what you have to know to get a decent meal at the old-line venues like Antoine’s.
There are problems everywhere. I eat at these restaurants anyway, and most of the time I enjoy them, but there is only one place where I know I can count on a flawless meal, without peer: Devlin Lemon’s little restaurant in the Garden District. It’s called the Lemon Tree and decorated with wrought-iron baskets full of bright yellow lemons with their leaves still attached. In lesser hands it could have some serious cuteness issues. In Devlin’s hands, you just want to prostrate yourself on the cerulean carpet and cry, “Feed me, you eponymous, lemon-stacking, brilliant fool.” Or at least I do.
Devlin came from the frozen North with a Culinary Institute of America degree and a love for local ingredients. Anything that passes through his hands - a steak, a lobe of Hudson Valley foie gras, an unpasteurized French cheese - is likely to come out tasting good, but he has always reached the apex of his talent with Louisiana ingredients: Gulf fish, artichokes, Creole tomatoes, andouille and tasso, cane syrup, even mirlitons. I’ve never met another cook who could make a mirliton taste like anything but a sweaty sock. Devlin bakes them with shrimp, garlic, and a shocking amount of butter until they release a hitherto untold sweetness.
(All right, you nitpicking foodies. Yes, I am talking to you. I know you’ve been squirming since you read the words ‘unpasteurized French cheese’, and I am quite aware that these ambrosial creations are legally forbidden to enter the country, let alone appear on a restaurant menu. The only thing I can say is all that’s on the menu is not always all you can eat, and a good chef takes care of his regulars.)
Devlin knows everything I like and hate to eat. He knows that I am genetically disposed to think cilantro tastes like soap and that I can’t stand cauliflower because it reminds me of certain cancers I see. He knows I will not eat amberjack under any circumstances; it was he who told me of the giant worms that lurk in its digestive tract. He knows how dearly I love sorrel, caviar, and clotted cream. At the Lemon Tree, I glance at the menu, but I usually end up telling my waitperson, “Ask Devlin what Dr Brite should have today.”
Lest you get the wrong idea, nothing has ever ‘happened’, as they say, between us. We are both happily married. Any intimacy between me and Devlin is purely about his feeding and my eating.
It was May, close enough to my birthday that I had begun to wonder whether Devlin might find me something special - some Iranian caviar, perhaps, or some really fresh white truffles. I’ve never considered having my birthday dinner anywhere but the Lemon Tree, and some celebratory tidbit almost always finds its way onto the table.
I was at work in the basement of the big stone building at the corner of Tulane and Broad, where I spend a large part of my life. I’d spent the morning posting a young man killed in an automobile accident near the Calliope housing project (gross cranial trauma) and a fat old lady who died in her sleep (coronary event). I was beginning to think about lunch as my assistant wheeled out the last body that had come in the night before, a robbery victim who’d been shot in the head. I saw that the victim was wearing check-patterned chefs pants and work boots, but did not find this surprising. Kitchen workers keep strange hours and are often (wrongly) thought to be carrying large amounts of cash. His shirt had already been removed.
At first, I could only see that he was a young white man. The gun had been small and his cranium was intact, but even a low-caliber bullet to the head can distort facial features beyond recognition. This is mainly because the hemorrhaging of the brain produces gases that force blood into the tissues, particularly those around the eyes. This man’s eyes were swollen shut and looked as if they had been smeared with heavy purple-black makeup. His lips were drawn rigidly across his teeth, and the teeth had dried blood on them. His hair was thickly crusted with blood; only a few clean strands told me that it had been strawberry-blond. This may have been when the first breath of suspicion touched me, but if so, I did not notice it.
I parted the hair with my latex-gloved fingers. “Slightly stellate entry wound behind and below the right ear,” I said to my assistant, Jeffrey, who wrote it down. “Stippling of the tissue around the entry wound. No exit wound. The bullet’s still in there. What’s his name?”
“That’s a funny thing,” said Jeffrey. “I can’t find his report. I’m gonna have to call upstairs for the dupe.”
“Well, go do it, please. I’ll get him undressed.” I picked up a pair of scissors and began to cut his pants off. As I did, his left hand slipped off the table and hung over the edge; rigor had not completely stiffened him yet.
Something about that hand caught my eye: a black-ink wedding band tattooed around the third finger. Many cooks don’t like to wear wedding rings because they can so easily get snagged or lost, so this kind of tattoo is common. Devlin had one. His was done in a distinctive crosshatched pattern, just like the one on this man’s hand.
I had opened one pants leg up to the crotch. Then I put the scissors down, moved to the head of the table, and looked carefully into the man’s face. A warm rush of adrenaline spread through the muscles of my back as I saw what I had not seen before. The eyeball protrusion, tissue infiltration, and rigor had disguised him, but they could not hide his identity completely.
I was supporting my entire weight on the edge of
the table when Jeffrey came back. “I don’t have to call upstairs,” he said. “I found his paperwork on the floor in the cooler - Dr Brite? What’s wrong?”
“I know him.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Let me see that paperwork.” I scanned the police report, but it told me nothing I didn’t already know: he had been shot in a robbery leaving the restaurant; he had been dead about eight hours; he was Devlin Lemon.
“I’m not posting him,” I said.
“Well, of course not. We’ll get Dr Garrison to post him.”
“Nobody’s posting him,” I said.
“What?”
“He can’t - I mean, we can’t - oh, God.” I bowed my head to hide the tears that stood in my eyes. Jeffrey had never seen me cry. No one at the morgue had ever seen me cry. I don’t socialize a great deal, but inevitably I had seen acquaintances on my tables before. I see everyone who dies in New Orleans. But none had affected me like this. I took a deep breath. “I have reason to suspect the presence of a communicable disease in this case,” 1 said. It was the only half-plausible reason I could think of to delay the autopsy. “I’m keeping the body here until further notice.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 22
