Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

“Marshall,” she called.

  Then, “Mom?”

  The nurse’s hand on her brow was cool. “You’re in the hospital dear. How do you feel?”

  “Could you turn on the light?” Tanya asked. “I can’t see.”

  There was no answer at first, and then she heard the nurse talking to someone at the far end of the room. Whispers, and the tongue clicks of pity.

  “It may pass,” she heard a woman say.

  But it didn’t.

  Her world remained a black void where only sound could enter. Tanya was alone in a room without windows. Her food had no taste, the roses had no smell. And no color.

  But she could feel them. It became her only release. To press the world against herself in a smothering embrace. “You’re there,” she sometimes murmured. “You’re there, I can feel you.”

  Tanya met Mel at a special education class. He was the teacher, and she loved to listen to the mellifluous tones of his voice. It was caramel and chocolate. Molasses and cream. She already loved him when he told her she was pretty one night, as she stood in the foyer, waiting for the familiar step of her mother who came each night to drop her off and pick her up. She felt her skin flush, but at the same time, shrugged away his compliment.

  “No,” she said softly, “…but thank you.”

  He took her hand in his – wide, leathery, strong – and pressed it tightly.

  “Yes, you are. Do you like coffee?”

  “I can’t taste it,” she deflected.

  “You can feel hot and cold, can’t you?”

  In a month, her mother was no longer driving her to school. In six, Tanya was standing against the wall in their kitchen, listening as piece by piece of her 25 years were carried past, landing with thuds and rattles and grunts in the bed of Mel’s van.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he promised her mother. Tanya imagined the wrinkles playing like braille across her mother’s falling cheeks.

  “Do,” was all she said.

  Mel fed her ice cream and coffee that she couldn’t taste, but could feel. He massaged her feet. Mel read Sylvia Plath and Jackie Collins to her. Mel seemed to smile with his voice at every move she made. But most importantly, Mel took her to the rose garden.

  “I can’t,” she insisted, the first time they drove to the conservatory. “It’s where… I… just can’t.”

  “Taste the air with your tongue,” he advised. “Feel the scent in the humidity on your skin. It’s healthy, even if you can’t see them or smell them.”

  In the end, she gave in, and walked with him tremulously on nearly even flagstone steps. Once she stumbled at the rough rise of a heavy stone and he held her upright by her elbow. She shook with relief and fear. But as they wove deeper into the strange maze of muffled glass houses, she realized he was right. Each house was like a special pressure chamber; the air changed its feel, growing Florida muggy and Phoenix arid and Oregon cool damp with each whoosh of the doors behind them. Its flavor eluded her but she could feel its taste. The heat of the sun through the glass panes warmed her head and neck and the clasp of his hand on hers led her to explore the more ethereal aspects of the garden, if not its view.

  “Touch this,” he commanded, moving her hand by encircling her entire wrist, and placing it in contact with ferns and foliage, buds and stems.

  And then.

  “Touch this,” he said, and laughed when she drew back in pain.

  “Every rose has its thorn,” he said then, and hugged her to him.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” she pouted, pushing him away. But he kissed her and apologized.

  “If you don’t feel the pointed things in life, you’ll soon take the soft ones for granted,” he said. This made sense to her and she found she loved him more.

  “Can I feel your pointed thing,” she giggled, running a hand up his thigh.

  “Yes,” he promised, but instead led her to feel the bark of a sequoia tree. It was rough against the back of her hand and she pressed against it, drawing its detail inside herself until her hand was raw. Her blood flowed hot through her arms and she knew that she had crossed a precipice. A divide. She had spent years learning how to avoid bumping into furniture, years hiding from the sharp edges of the world. Years hiding from Marshall.

  She wasn’t hiding anymore.

  “Let’s get married,” she announced, and in a house filled with unseen armies of roses, she listened as his voice trembled and he said, simply, “yes.”

  “I’m going to grow you a rose garden,” Mel said one day, as he lightly ran a knife along the bottom slope of her cleavage. It was a game they had developed. She had taken his message to heart: every rose has its thorn. She would not try to savor the rose without first feeling its thorns. It made the end pleasure of the petals so much more intense. Likewise, she would not make love to Mel without first snipping her nerve ends raw.

  He would carve sweet nothings in her skin or decorate her with forests of twining, twisting pins. Each sharp prick of her flesh made her face contract, and yet, the rush of the blood through her heart made her beg him not to stop. Each week, they played the game anew, the goal changing with every implement Mel used. The pain made her feel alive, broke her out of her black detachment from everything around.

  “Can you stand 40 pins?” he would ask.

  “Yes,” she answered, in a tiny voice. “45.”

  If she cried “uncle” before reaching the number, she lost. If she let him go further, she won. Either way, when the game was over and his kisses finally swelled her lips and tightened her nipples, she ended in ecstasy.

  “I would like a rose garden,” she admitted presently. “I could feel their petals against my skin every day, then.”

  “And their thorns,” he added.

  “Yes,” she said. “And their thorns.”

  The first time they walked together in the garden, the rose bushes had no buds. Tanya ran her hands up their thin stems and winced as the blood ran in rivulets down her arm.

  “They’re all thorn,” she complained.

  “Give them time,” he said. “First come the thorns, and then the flowers.”

  And they did come. The garden grew with the breadth of her belly, which Mel had seeded with a child. And in her fifth month, Tanya felt the first perfect, satin-smooth bloom.

  “Oh, Mel,” she praised. “It feels wonderful. It’s softer than a feather, and more velvety than velvet.”

  He laughed and promised, “Soon, it will all be in bloom. Just like you.”

  When the contractions racked her body with feral bites of pain in her sixth month, Tanya cried for her baby, and for herself. She felt alive with the fire, and yet shredded near death at its kiss. It was over quickly; Tanya writhed and sobbed in the endless darkness and her pregnancy rushed out of her in a flood of bitter, heated acid. The bed was sodden, soaked in an empty broken promise.

  She didn’t blame Mel, and yet… His knives seemed sharper of late, his games more intense. She wondered, as her wracking pains slowed, could his long needled probes have killed their child? Just yesterday, he had brought her to screams with his penetrations.

  No, unfair, her mind railed. That was her fault, as much as his. She craved the blades, encouraged their attacks. The pain made her feel. Its intensity almost made up for the senses long lost, but still imagined. Sometimes the ghost of a peppermint stick washed painfully across her tongue making her mouth water, or the scent of her father’s aftershave before church on a Sunday smothered her to coughing for a second before disappearing, leaving behind an emptiness deeper than the black sea her eyes swam in, day after night. She wished more than anything that she could part that cruel curtain, and see the man who kissed her and held her and kept her safe, as he indulged her twisted needs.

  She wept then with guilt at her lack of trust in him. Guilt at her own inadequacy. She had lost their baby. Even in this she was only half a woman.

  Mel only made her feel worse as he waited on her carefully, patiently, over the next f
ew days, bringing her soup and toast and helping her to the bathroom, watching to make sure her bleeding didn’t continue.

  “I love you,” she told him, “I’m sorry.” And he hugged her tightly.

  Two weeks after her miscarriage, Mel came into their bedroom and announced, “The roses are in full bloom. Do you want to go?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and he took her hand dramatically, like a knight come to escort the princess to the ball.

  The stairs seemed endless, her legs weak and trembly; it had been almost two weeks since she’d left her bed.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” he asked, as they walked through the kitchen.

  She nodded and took a breath.

  “I’ll be fine. I need to walk.”

  Step by step they descended to the garden, the air teasing Tanya’s hair in a ghostly kiss that made her sigh.

  “I’ve missed it out here. Show me the prettiest ones.”

  He took her hand and guided her to a bush of thick cushiony buds. Tanya held the thorns to her palm and brushed the petals across her cheek to tickle her nose.

  “Tell me how it smells,” she begged.

  He laughed. “Like life,” he said, his voice heavy and delicious. “It smells like the breath of the sun and the kiss of life.”

  She left his guiding hand then and twirled her way through the garden, stopping at each scratch of thorn across her flesh to kiss and rub the buoyant flowers on top, laughing with a giddiness that had seemed lost to her just an hour before.

  “My roses are beautiful,” she laughed. “Thank you.”

  “There’s just one thing,” he said, his voice close in her ear, startling her. She’d thought he remained by the stairs.

  “What’s the matter?” he said when she jumped at his voice. “Did I scare you?”

  “No,” she said, steadying herself against his shoulder. “I just didn’t hear you there.”

  “I can be very quiet,” he agreed.

  “What one thing?” she asked.

  “The garden is not quite complete.”

  Something stabbed at Tanya’s back and he yelled “wait, stand still,” as she shrieked, backpedaling into a razor sharp tangle of thorn and flower.

  “Something bit me,” she cried out. “Mel?”

  His hand reached out to her elbow to steady her. But she was still off balance; she felt the blood running down her back and she twisted, lashing out at the bite, finding her hands punching, not some stray dog at her feet, but hitting Mel’s face.

  “Take it easy,” he soothed, voice of chocolate tinged with bitter lemon, but she was tumbling away from him, tripped by the slash of a rose stem and sudden vertigo.

  The world exploded in a rainbow of fireworks across Tanya’s black horizon, and with the light, her thoughts blinked out.

  Her first thought was that her right leg was broken. A stabbing, red-hot scald ran up and down its length.

  Her next was that something had died.

  “My god, what is that smell?” she exclaimed, not realizing what she had said until she opened her eyes and saw the man bending over her leg, using an instrument resembling a cheese grater to peel slices of skin from her thigh.

  Without thinking she kneed him in the face and pulled herself backwards, crablike.

  “What…” she began to ask, ignoring the blood running in slow dribbles from her leg and looking around her.

  “…is this?”

  The man was rubbing his chin with his hand. He was the ugliest man Tanya had ever seen. His left eye was glazed over with white, his cheeks were sunken and gray. Her hands had always known that his arms were somehow misshapen, but now she could see the breadth of his deformity; odd tufts of hair matched with twisted cords of muscle to produce a manged and mangled appearance. His chin jutted sideways and his nose was just a blob of wide-pored clay. His face and arms were covered with a network of discolored scars, a pink and white cross work of snip and stitch.

  “You can see!” he exclaimed. His grin grew wider, dragging his cheeks into eclipse with his eyes. He scrambled to his feet, and lifted his arms.

  “I’ve built it all for you,” he said, gesturing around them at the low ceilinged heat lamps beating down orange and bare between the wooden beams just a couple feet above them, and the quiet, slowly oscillating wall fan. There were no windows, only four concrete walls. All this time, she’d thought it was a spacious garden of open breezy air beneath the warmth of the sun.

  “It’s your very own private garden,” Mel bragged. “It will never fade or wilt. It will always be here for you to touch.”

  Tanya stared at the basement maze of winding paths amid twined branches of barbed wire. She was surrounded by the glint of metal, some barbs rusted, no doubt from the spray of her own blood. At the top of most of the barbed wire bushes were the pale flowers she had brushed her face against so many times these past months. Intricate blooms of layered petals, painstakingly pieced together by her husband and mounted, somehow, on these bushes of unforgiving cruel steel.

  “I started with my skin,” he explained, pointing to a misshapen rose of brownish black. A strip of Tanya’s own bleeding flesh still hung, seemingly forgotten, from his clenched hand.

  “It took me a few tries to learn the best way to cure it without it rotting or turning hard. After that, it was easy. Just harvest and cure, assemble and mount. Your mother gave us this whole section here,” he gestured to a group of pasty bloomed bushes, adding, “And I did this whole bush here just last week.”

  He pointed to the devilish twinings of barb and peach-fuzz fine flower next to her.

  “That’s the culmination of our love, honey.”

  She looked at the pinkish buds, tightly woven petals seemingly bursting with the need to open and shower their scent to the world.

  “That’s our baby,” he said, nodding, white eye glinting like the moon on a gray day. “Isn’t she beautiful? She was delicate to peel, but I think she’s the most beautiful rose here.”

  The tears coursed in heated rivers down her face as she touched the baby soft skin of the rose crafted from her lost child. Then she kissed it and breathed in the scent of her daughter.

  “How could you?” she whispered, stomach contracting in horror and despair. Her senses attacked with an intensity sharper than any knife Mel had ever wielded. She could smell the gagging stench of decay of her mother and baby all around her like a palpable thing, a blanket of death. And the everywhere glint of steel and skin made her want to close her eyes again forever.

  She looked down, unable to face the remains of her baby. Or her husband. She saw the sheen of electric red blood slicking her leg, and saw the scars that pitted and poked their way up her thighs, turning to criss-cross trails of a city road map gone mad on her belly. Her once taut and beautifully creamy skin was a wrinkled mess of tears and mends, slices and stitches. There was no more beauty there; her youth was carved away, one pore at a time. Left behind on the points of Mel’s pins and knives and barbed wire roses. There were spots discolored, like the stretched skin of a wax figure that was slowly melting and stretching, taffy in the ghastly machine. Idly, she wondered which of the roses here was made of her own tortured flesh. Surely some of the gouges she’d thought to be innocent wounds of passion at the time had been meant to make harvests for Mel’s twisted garden.

  “Are you OK, honey?” he asked softly. “I know it’s probably a lot to take all at once.”

  She nodded, unable to answer, eyes drawn again and again from her own ruined torso to the tender sculpting of her baby before her, every petal paper thin, yet still a rose grown thicker than most in life. There were bare stems next to it still, barbed branches waiting patiently for their own bloodroses to bloom, and Tanya closed her eyes and said, “it was better to be blind.”

  She closed her hands around the barren stems until blood dripped brightly to the ground below. She brought her face down as if to sniff the sharpened barbs and then with a wrench screamed as their tips scraped
out her sight, a violent abortion, fake thorns carving new scars in the broken pits of her eyes.

  Dimly she heard Mel’s usually honeyed voice turn to broken glass as he screamed “no,” but it didn’t stop her from twisting the rose stems this way and that, twirling them deliberately all around until the red fire of pain and betrayal slipped from nausea, to numbness, to final, freeing black.

  Tanya loved the roses, but she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.

  Afterword

  he year 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of my first short story sale to a magazine (“Tomorrow,” which was eventually reprinted in this collection). In a few months from the time of this writing, it will be the 15th anniversary of me signing the contract for my first book, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. I’ve published a lot of work since then, including seven novels, but Cage of Bones will always hold a very special place in my heart for me.

  Back in 1999, when Delirium Books agreed to publish this collection, I had been sending submissions out to magazines for six years, and had published dozens of short stories, in a lot of very tiny magazines. But as the ’90s were winding to a close, I’d finally started “cracking” some markets that were a little more well-known (in the horror community, anyway). “Cage of Bones” had appeared in Into The Darkness (the editor would shortly thereafter found Necro Publications), “Pumpkin Head” had appeared in Grue, “Anniversary” in Dead of Night and “Remember Me, My Husband” in Terminal Fright. These were important magazines to me; they were the places I had dreamed for years of having my stories appear in. Plus, “Tomorrow,” my very first sale, had been accepted by 2 A.M., and “When Barrettes Brought Justice…” by Haunts, both of those holy grail magazines for me at the time, though both publications folded before printing those stories. So when the fledgling Delirium Magazine accepted both “Pumpkin Head” as a reprint and “The Mouth” for first-time publication, I figured I had a lot of published work and I decided to pitch the editor, Shane Ryan Staley, on putting together a collection of my stories. He had just announced that in addition to publishing the magazine, his new imprint Delirium Books would be publishing a line of soft and hardcover fiction collections, and I figured I might have a shot at a softcover book.