Are You Loathsome Tonight?

by Poppy Z. Brite

  His supplies were ready on the nightstand. Justin plugged the drill's power cord into the socket behind the bed, gently thumbed up one of Suko's makeup-smudged eyelids and examined the silvery sclera. The sleeping pills had worked fine, as always. He ground them up and put them in a glass before he left. That way, when he brought home company, Justin could simply pour him a drink in the special glass.

  He used the scissors to slice off Suko's shirt, which was so artfully ripped up that Justin hardly had to damage it further to remove it. He cut away the beads and amulets, saving the tiny wooden penis, which had caught his eye back at the Stag. His own penis ached and burned. He pressed his ear against the narrow chest, heard the lungs pull in a deep slow breath, then release it just as easily. He heard blood moving unhurried through arteries and veins, heard a secret stomach sound from down below. Justin could listen to a boy's chest and stomach all night, but reluctantly he took his ear away.

  He crawled onto the bed, positioned Suko's head in his lap, and hefted the drill, which was heavier than he remembered. He hoped he would be able to control how far the bit went in. A fraction of an inch too deep into the brain could ruin everything. It was only the frontal lobes he wanted to penetrate, the cradle of free will.

  Justin parted the boy's thick black hair and placed the diamond-tipped bit against the center of the pale, faintly shiny scalp. He took a deep breath, bit his lip, and squeezed the trigger. When he took the drill away, there was a tiny, perfect black hole near the crown of the boy's head.

  He picked up the syringe, slid the needle in and forward, toward the forehead. He felt a tiny resistance, as if the needle was passing through a hair-thin elastic membrane. He pushed the plunger and flooded the boy's brain with chlorine bleach.

  Three things happened at once.

  Suko's eyes fluttered open.

  Justin had an explosive orgasm in his pants.

  Something heavy thudded against the bathroom door.

  Suko saw the blond man's face upside down, the lilac eyes like little slices of moon, the mouth a reverse smile or grimace. A whining buzz filled his skull, seemed to jar the very plates of his skull, as if hornets had built a nest inside his brain. A dull ache spread spiderlike over the top of his head.

  He smelled roses, though he had seen none in the room. He smelled wood shavings, the sharp stink of shit, the perfume of ripe oranges. Each of these scents was gone as quickly as it had come. Lingering was a burnt metallic flavor, a little like the taste that had lingered in his mouth the time he'd had a tooth filled in Bangkok.

  Shavings. Roses. Cut grass. Sour milk. And underneath it all, the smell of rotting flesh.

  Suko's field of vision went solid screaming chartreuse, then danger red. Now Justin was back, a negative of himself, hair green, face inky purple, eyes white circles with pinholes at their centers like tiny imploding suns. And suddenly something else was in the frame as well. Something all black, with holes where no holes should be. A face swollen and torn, a face that could not be alive, but whose jaw was moving.

  A hand missing most of its fingers closed on the back of Justin's hair and yanked. A drooling purple mouth closed on Justin's throat and tore away a chunk.

  Suko managed to sit up. His vision spun and yawed. The reek of rot was dizzying, and overlying it was a new stinging smell, a chemical smell he could not identify. Something salty ran into his eyes. He touched his face, and his fingers came away slicked with a thin clear substance.

  The thing wrapped skeletal arms around Justin and pulled him off the bed. They rolled on the floor together, Justin's blood fountaining out of his throat, the thing grunting and lapping at it. Ragged flesh trailed from its mouth.

  Justin wasn't screaming, Suko realized.

  He was smiling.

  It was the boy from the bathtub. Justin couldn't see his face, but he could smell the Clorox, raw and fresh. He had carved a great deal of flesh off of this one, as well as removing the viscera. But he had not yet cut off the head. Now it was snuggled under his chin, tongue burrowing like a worm into his wounded throat. He felt the teeth tearing at him, chunks of his skin and muscle disappearing down the boy's gullet. He felt one of the bones in his neck crack and splinter.

  The pain was as shocking as an orgasm, but cleaner. The joy was like nothing he had known before, not when he watched his mother die, not when he tasted the flesh of another person for the first time. It had worked. Not only was the Asian boy still alive, but the others had come back as well. They had never left Justin at all. They had only been waiting.

  He got his arms around the hollow body, pulled it closer. He cupped the cold rubbery buttocks, entwined his legs with the thrusting bones of its thighs. When its jaws released his throat, he pressed his face against the voracious swollen one, pushed his tongue between the blackened lips and felt the teeth rip it out. His mouth filled with blood and rot. He swallowed, gagged, swallowed again.

  A head rolled out from under the bed, pushing itself by frantic motions of jaw and tongue. The severed ends of the neck muscles twitched, trying to help it along. Its nose and left eyebrow were pierced with silver rings, its empty eyesockets crusted with blood and greasy black makeup. It reached Justin and bit deep into one of his thighs. He kicked once, in surprise, then bent his leg so that the teeth could more easily get at the soft muscle of his groin. He felt his flesh peeling away.

  The upper half of a body was pulling itself out of the closet. Its black-lacquered nails dug into the carpet. Ropes of intestine trailed behind it, coming apart, leaving a trail of shit and ichor on the rug. This one had been, possibly, a Mexican boy. Now its skin was the color of decaying eggplant, and very few teeth were left in its gaping mouth. Dimly Justin remembered extracting them with a pair of pliers after the rigor mortis had slackened.

  It tore Justin's belly open with its hands and sank its face into his guts. He arched his back, felt its fingers plunging deep, its mouth lapping at the very core of him.

  The small pleasures of his life—reading, listening to the music of another time, choking the life out of boys and playing with their abandoned shells—were nothing compared to this. He wanted it to go on forever.

  But, eventually, he died.

  The corpse from the bathtub chewed at Justin's throat and chest. Half-chewed pieces of Justin slid down its gullet, into the great scooped-out hollow of its abdomen, out onto the floor.

  The corpse from the closet sucked up the liquor and partly digested meat it found in Justin's stomach.

  The head bit into Justin's scrotum and gulped the savory mass of the testicles like a pair of tender oysters.

  They seemed to know when to stop feeding, to refrain from pulling him completely apart, to leave enough of him. When he came back, Justin knew exactly what to do.

  After all, he had been doing it long before most of the others.

  Suko stumbled out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Something was rolling around and around in the refrigerator, banging against the inside of the door. He almost went over to open it, only caught himself at the last second. He wasn't thinking very clearly. His head felt wrong somehow, his brain caught in a downward spiral. He did not understand what he had just seen. But he knew he had to get out of the apartment.

  No problem, a voice yammered in his head. Stay cool. Chill out. Don't have a cow, man. He barely knew the meaning of the words. The American voice seemed to be receding down a long black tunnel; already it was so tiny and faint he could hardly hear it. He realized he was thinking in Thai for the first time in years. Even his native language was strange, a flurry of quick sharp syllables like little whirling razorblades slicing into the meat of his brain.

  He fumbled with the complicated series of locks, yanked the door open and nearly fell into the hall. How had he entered the building? ... Up a metal staircase, through a door at the end of the long dark hall. He reached it and let himself out. The hot October night seared his lungs. He could smell every poisonous particle of exhaust blanketing the
city, every atom of shit and filth and blood baked onto the streets. Not like the ripe wet kiss of Bangkok, but so arid, so mercilessly dry. He felt his way down the fire escape and around the corner of the building.

  The empty street seemed a mile wide. There was no sidewalk, only a steep curb and a long gray boulevard stretching away toward some other part of the city. There were no cars; he could hear no traffic anywhere. Even with his head feeling so strange, Suko knew something was wrong. L.A. streets were often empty of people, but always there were cars.

  Far away at the next intersection, he made out a small group of figures straggling in his direction, bathed in a traffic light's red glow. For a long moment he watched them come, trying to be sure they were really there, wondering what he should do. Then he started toward them. The blond man had done something awful to his head; he needed help. Maybe the figures would be able to help him.

  But when he got closer, he saw that they were like the things he had seen in the bedroom. One had a long fatty slash wound across its bare torso. One had been gouged in the face with something jagged; its nose was cloven in half and an eyeball hung out of the socket, leaking yolky fluid. One had no wounds, but looked as if it had starved to death; its nude body was all bone-ends and wasted hollows, its genitals shriveled into the pelvic cavity, its blue-white skin covered with huge black and purple lesions.

  When they saw him, the things opened their mouths and widened their nostrils, catching his scent. It was too late to get away. He couldn't run, didn't think he would even be able to stand up much longer. He stumbled forward and gave himself to them.

  The little group closed around Suko, keeping him on his feet, supporting him as best they could. Gouged Eyeball caught him and steadied him. Slash Wound mouthed his shoulder as if in comfort, but did not bite. Lesions nudged him, urged him on. Suko realized they were herding him. They recognized him as one of their own, separated from the flock somehow. They were welcoming him back in.

  Miserably, Suko wondered what would happen when they met someone alive.

  Then the hunger flared in his belly, and he knew.

  Pin Money

  People ask how Christa and I wrote “Triads.” Answer: A lot of 4 a.m. coast-to-coast phone calls, a lot of Hong Kong gangster movies, and a lot of work, most of which was done by Christa. We shared the writing pretty equally, but she did probably 95% of the research and laying-out of the plot. Much of the characterization of the two boys from the opera school was hers as well. But the dangerous French-Chinese pretty boy who turned out not to be so dangerous—Perique—he was all mine. Two years later, I found another story to tell about him. It's actually a “prequel,” but I hate that word.

  Pin Money

  Nicole cradled her newborn son and gazed through her window at the moon rising in the purple Shanghai sky. Her pussy throbbed in time with her heartbeat, a low, gnawing ache that persisted despite the bitter herb tea the midwife had made her drink. Though Nicole's labor had ended hours ago, her lover had not yet entered the room. She was beginning to feel afraid.

  What is there to fear? she wondered. I'm in one of the finest houses in the French Concession. I've just given a rich man his first son. There will be no more eternal nights on high heels, no more grinning into ugly drunken faces, no more scrounging for the rent. It is nearly June already; why should I feel so cold?

  She took a deep draught of the nighttime air, rich with the heady scent of roses. Her bedroom looked out over the formal rose garden, and she had breathed their perfume every day of her confinement.

  Nicole had left Paris three years ago, in 1914, just before the first German bombs fell. Since then she had felt no urge to return. Her friends had said the Orient would be crawling with disease and danger, but Shanghai was cleaner than Paris had ever been. In Paris she sometimes had to do filthy things just to feed herself. In Shanghai she made good money working as a hostess in a swanky dance hall.

  As for the danger, she hadn't believed in it until she met Tom Lee.

  A trader of things legal and otherwise—mostly otherwise—Mr. Lee had spent a great deal of money on Nicole, claimed to love her, then seemed to tire of the whole thing after a couple of back-scratching, eye-gouging marathon fucks. This was nothing new, and Nicole quickly forgot Mr. Lee. When she missed her next period, she had no thought of contacting him, but planned to see a herbalist to take care of the problem. If she had not happened to mention this to her friend Daisy, a Chinese bartender at the club, the matter would have ended there.

  "Tom Lee?" Daisy repeated incredulously. “The importer? The man who moves so much opium that the Triads have given him a scale made of gold?"

  “But I don't want a baby..."

  “Listen to me. You cannot do this. Everyone knows that Tom Lee has always wanted an heir, but refuses to marry. If you abort his child and he finds out, he will have you killed."

  “And if I tell him I am carrying it? Why should he believe me?"

  “He will want to believe you. He will care for you until the baby is born, then pay you off and send you away. This is your only choice."

  But Tom had made no mention of paying her, or of sending her away. He could not marry for obscure legal reasons, he said, but he would love Nicole as his wife and the mother of his son. He never mentioned the possibility of a daughter. Gradually Nicole succumbed to the vision of a hazy, wealthy future, a brace of shining sons, perhaps a small opium habit once the childbearing was over with.

  Soft footsteps sounded in the hall. Here was Tom at last, come to see his perfect boy. Nicole's fingers found the top of the baby's head, stroked the silky black tuft of hair. She could not say why she was afraid to look at the opening door, afraid to question the source of the quick light footsteps crossing the room.

  A hand covered her mouth. Another yanked her head back. The moon engulfed her vision now, filled the whole sky with its dazzling brightness. When they began to work on her, she could not tell where the moonlight ended and the pain began.

  ***

  The house of Perique's father contained many mansions. Some were made of precious stones and metal, some of hand-cut paper, some of carved wood or ivory. All were miniatures of famous Western and Oriental structures: a jade Versailles, a scrimshaw Taj Mahal. The summer he was ten, Perique spent a great deal of time studying these mansions through their polished glass cases, wondering what life would be like there, no, there. Sometimes he thought he saw a ghost looking back at him, but it always proved to be the faint reflection of his own face: the sharp features and strange green eyes that marked him as a half-breed.

  Today he was staring at a jewel-encrusted replica of Napoleon's tomb. He was admiring its blatant, unapologetic grandeur, and certainly he was pondering Paris. But most of all he was trying not to think about the tale his father had just told him.

  It was not unusual for Perique to be called into his father's office. In 1927, Tom Lee had not yet despaired of teaching his son the family business, and Perique was sometimes recruited to add figures, stamp documents, or weigh out black bars of opium. Today he had had to do none of these things. Today he had only stood before his father's desk, eyes fixed on the tips of his glossy leather shoes, listening mutely as his father unraveled the world like a ball of string.

  “Your mother did not die giving birth to you. That is what I allowed you to believe as a child, but now that you are growing into a man, you must know the truth. To discover what you are capable of, you must know what I am capable of."

  Tom Lee described the dance hall, the brief romance, the blossoming of Nicole's pregnancy. He had hired the best midwife in Shanghai, paid her to ensure with certain herbs and prayers that the issue would be male. After Nicole delivered, while she was still in a semiconscious twilight of drugs and pain, Tom had the child taken from her arms and brought to him.

  “I examined you carefully, looking for traces of ancestry—were you hers, or mine? I was most put off by your eyes, of course. Not only were they oddly shaped, but they were gr
een!

  “I thought of destroying you. But that was pure instinct, irrational. Of course, you were my son—and while I knew your mixed blood would make your life difficult in many ways, I also anticipated that Western connections could help our family in the future. That is why I named you as I did."

  “Perique” was a diminutive of Pierre Jean-Luc, a name Tom Lee had plucked at random from some French novel.

  “As I examined you, your mother was being killed."

  Perique looked up. His father's gaze was steady, with no more conscious cruelty in it than that of a lizard or snake.

  “Two of my associates entered her room. You know one of them—Cheung Toi, who died last year."

  Cheung Toi had always been especially kind to Perique, like a trusted uncle. Perique remembered crying at the news of his death.

  “He held her while the other man pushed a hatpin through her nostril into the brain. Death was instantaneous. She never felt a thing."

  When Perique managed to make his lips move, his voice felt rusty. “Can I visit my mother's grave?"

  “Her body was thrown from an opium junk into the middle of the South China Sea. By that time I had decided to keep you, based on a single identical characteristic we shared, a characteristic I took as a good omen."

  Perique would not, could not ask.

  “Our two cocks look exactly the same,” his father said, and began to laugh with no humor at all.

  ***

  Five years later, Perique's father ordered him out of the house, paid him handsomely to change his family name and leave Shanghai.

  Perique had been dipping into the opium stock for some time, but that was acceptable to a point. When Tom Lee found his son in bed with two girls and a boy, a position not enhanced by the fact that the girls were hungrily sucking each other's pussies while the boys watched, mesmerized—well, that was completely unacceptable.