Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

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Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 33

by Richard Bowes


  And then, during the eleventh year, he began to feel restless and uncomfortable. The life he led, hidden and secret, was no longer enough for him. He didn’t know why, nor could he trace the progress of this new irritability, although he tried for months to believe that it was only frustration and uncertainty. A Maker knows his contract has been fulfilled, and Michael still maintained a steady, safe distance.

  Michael maintained a distance.

  These four words marked a point of turning. Michael maintained his distance. But surely it wasn’t Michael? For not in Michael’s hands did the resolution of their bargain lay. It was Aazian who had to learn to love Michael. Human love. Human …

  When Michael returned from work, Aazian was waiting for him. But he was not waiting as he usually did, and when Michael came through the door, he offered him no warmth, no greeting. Instead, he stood in the pooled shadow by the lamp that still remained off. The patina of mortal lover was gone; the devil remained, the demon. In the vague light there was a glint of feral teeth, a glitter of whiteless eye, that spoke of ancient anger.

  “Aazian?” Michael’s voice was soft. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Only this,” Aazian said, rising. “You do not love me.” He could not keep the accusation out of his voice; he didn’t try. But Michael was almost demonic in his unpredictability.

  Instead of denying Aazian’s words, instead of decrying them as no part of their bargain, he became still, tense; almost breathless. “No,” he said at last.

  “Michael, I have come to understand your desire in my Making. It’s hard and I’ve learned much; I don’t know if there’s anything left for humanity to teach me. I will use this to my advantage when I have answered to my Lord.” He did not move; his eyes, all black, were intent. “But this bargain of ours cannot be fulfilled by me alone. That is the part that I did not understand.”

  Michael’s breath came out in a strange sigh, as if forced all at once from his body. “Is that what it was all about?” he asked. Aazian knew, by the queer distant look on his face, that the question was asked not of him, but of the past. “I thought it was because he didn’t love me. Was it because I couldn’t love him?”

  “No,” Aazian said, but quietly; the anger had fled as it often did in Michael’s presence. “You couldn’t love each other. Love is not something that can be done by one.” He looked away, then, into the streets. Looked at the threaded ribbon of human souls as they walked, as they beckoned. “And I cannot continue.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Won’t.”

  Michael swallowed. His lips trembled with words; Aazian feared they might remain unsaid. “No.” His gaze hit the floor, as if weighted there, but he began to talk. “If I love you,” his voice was a whisper, “I give you my soul. I don’t own myself anymore.”

  “Yes,” Aazian said. “That is the choice you make.” He paused before continuing. “You love your parents, and they own enough of you that you’re willing to lie to them.”

  “I can’t lie to you,” Michael replied, although he still would not give Aazian a glimpse of his eyes. And then Michael laughed, almost wild, and looked up; his eyes were red. This was as close as he ever came to tears. “I told him that,” he said, defiant. “That I wouldn’t give him my soul. This is an irony that even he would have appreciated.” He shook himself, shedding the stiffness, the unnatural containment, with which he had wrapped himself, and walked over to Aazian. “Don’t give up yet. I’ll try. All right?” He touched the contours of Aazian’s face as if they were a foreign texture. “But I know as much about it as you do. Be patient?”

  Aazian felt a curious tightness settle around him, a mixture of relief and of terror. Relief won; he drew Michael tightly into his arms. “I think,” he said, against a curl of Michael’s hair, “that you know less than I.”

  But Aazian met Michael’s family, which was a matter of shock to both of his parents, of disgrace to his brother, and of relief to his sister. All this, when Michael never once mentioned his soul or the exact nature of his lover’s foreign country. But Aazian understood the fear and prejudice well, and because it was almost familiar—a reminder of the void and the fires—he dwelt comfortably with it and did not fight it.

  He met Michael’s friends, and was surprised to find that they were few, if close. They accepted him with barely veiled curiosity, mild envy, and great happiness for Michael. This alloy of emotion was also comfortable.

  And they survived Michael’s fear—which was perhaps the hardest part of all.

  The seasons turned in time, and when the last winter arrived Aazian knew it. It shadowed Michael’s face with the cold of its long fingers. Aazian, of course, did not age—but he kept up the appearance; for some reason, Michael preferred it. Michael was not very old, but the thing that killed him had no regard for age or love or dignity. Aazian had no further power over Michael’s life, and had he the ability to make Michael healthy again, he wasn’t certain what he would have done. He did not want Michael Brandt to die. But only upon Michael’s death would the soul be his. And it would be his.

  Aazian did not lie to Michael, and Michael did not ask it of him. They greeted death with the dignity that they could, and if Michael cried or raged or pleaded, it was a private matter, a momentary pain, that Aazian would never take advantage of. While Michael slept, Aazian watched him; when he woke, Aazian spoke with him. Toward the end, he did what he could to ease his pain and comfort him.

  “I think,” Michael whispered, late one night in the hospital ward, “you won. What will I look like in Hell?” He laughed, but his breath was a wheeze that ended with a shuddering cough.

  “In Hell?” Aazian replied quietly. “No, Michael—I think you’ve won.” He held Michael’s hand between his own; both were cold. “I will not take you to Hell. You asked me what love meant to me, as a devil, and I would not answer you. Hush now, and let me tell you. Love is what we felt for God and the Heavens.”

  “Then why did you leave it?” Michael asked, blissfully unaware of the enormity of what had been said.

  “Pride, Michael, and love for the Bright Lord, Lucifer.” He lifted Michael’s hand, curled his fingers up, and kissed them one by one. “But I love you enough to wish you to see what my love was once given to. Go where you will go.” He rose.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Hell, Michael. You will die soon—and I cannot be here to see it. My nature would not allow me to let you go.”

  Michael Brandt died five days later, in a stupor of pain and loneliness. He understood what Aazian had given him, but he took no comfort from it while alive. And dead?

  Dead, with the gates of Heaven open and the light and brilliance washing a sky that no mortal eyes will ever see, he wept. He wandered along a path that held only the peaceful and beatific, and he took no comfort from them. At last, he met the keeper of the gates themselves, and the keeper took one look at him and drew back.

  “You do not belong here,” he said, his voice grave and final.

  “No?” Michael asked. “How do I get where I belong?”

  “Jump.”

  It was a funny thing to be told, but the word was a command of sorts, and Michael took to air and darkness as he leaped into the unknown. No; not the unknown. He was going home.

  When he came at last to Hell, Aazian’s name was on his lips. He saw the darkness, felt the fire, heard the sounds of pain that only a soul stripped of flesh can utter; he cried out Aazian’s name that much louder. To be heard. To be felt.

  On the plateau of a plane that made no sense, had no meaning, Aazian found his soul, his Michael. They had no words to offer, no questions to ask. Michael ran the last few feet to Aazian’s embrace, and they clung together, a blotch on the landscape of Hell.

  Prince of Flowers

  Elizabeth Hand

  Helen’s first assignment on the inventory project was to the Department of Worms. For two weeks she paced the narrow alleys between immense tiers of glass cabinets, opening e
ndless drawers of freeze-dried invertebrates and tagging each with an acquisition number. Occasionally she glimpsed other figures, drab as herself in government-issue smocks, gray shadows stalking through the murky corridors. They waved at her but seldom spoke, except to ask directions; everyone got lost in the museum.

  Helen loved the hours lost in wandering the labyrinth of storage rooms, research labs, chilly vaults crammed with effigies of Yanomano Indians and stuffed jaguars. Soon she could identify each department by its smell: acrid dust from the feathered pelts in Ornithology; the cloying reek of fenugreek and syrup in Mammalogy’s roach traps; fish and formaldehyde in Ichthyology. Her favorite was Paleontology, an annex where the air smelled damp and clean, as though beneath the marble floors trickled hidden water, undiscovered caves, mammoth bones to match those stored above. When her two weeks in Worms ended she was sent to Paleo, where she delighted in the skeletons strewn atop cabinets like forgotten toys, disembodied skulls glaring from behind wastebaskets and bookshelves. She found a Fabrosaurus ischium wrapped in brown paper and labeled in crayon; beside it a huge hand-hewn crate dated 1886 and marked wyoming megosaur. It had never been opened. Some mornings she sat with a small mound of fossils before her, fitting the pieces together with the aid of a Victorian monograph. Hours passed in total silence, weeks when she saw only three or four people, curators slouching in and out of their research cubicles. On Fridays, when she dropped off her inventory sheets, they smiled. Occasionally even remembered her name. But mostly she was left alone, sorting cartons of bone and shale, prying apart frail skeletons of extinct fish as though they were stacks of newsprint.

  Once, almost without thinking, she slipped a fossil fish into the pocket of her smock. The fossil was the length of her hand, as perfectly formed as a fresh beech leaf. All day she fingered it, tracing the imprint of bone and scale. In the bathroom later she wrapped it in paper towels and hid it in her purse to bring home. After that she started taking things.

  At a downtown hobby shop she bought little brass and lucite stands to display them in her apartment. No one else ever saw them. She simply liked to look at them alone.

  Her next transfer was to Mineralogy, where she counted misshapen meteorites and uncut gems. Gems bored her, although she took a chunk of petrified wood and a handful of unpolished amethysts and put them in her bathroom. A month later she was permanently assigned to Anthropology.

  The Anthropology Department was in the most remote corner of the museum; its proximity to the boiler room made it warmer than the Natural Sciences wing, the air redolent of spice woods and exotic unguents used to polish arrowheads and ax-shafts. The ceiling reared so high overhead that the rickety lamps swayed slightly in draughts that Helen longed to feel. The constant subtle motion of the lamps sent flickering waves of light across the floor. Raised arms of Balinese statues seemed to undulate, and points of light winked behind the empty eyeholes of feathered masks.

  Everywhere loomed shelves stacked with smooth ivory and gaudily beaded bracelets and neck-rings. Helen crouched in corners loading her arms with bangles until her wrists ached from their weight. She unearthed dusty, lurid figures of temple demons and cleaned them, polished hollow cheeks and lapis eyes before stapling a number to each figure. A corner piled with tipi poles hid an abandoned desk that she claimed and decorated with mummy photographs and a ceramic coffee mug. In the top drawer she stored her cassette tapes and, beneath her handbag, a number of obsidian arrowheads. While it was never officially designated as her desk, she was annoyed one morning to find a young man tilted backward in the chair, shuffling through her tapes.

  “Hello,” he greeted her cheerfully. Helen winced and nodded coolly. “These your tapes? I’ll borrow this one some day, haven’t got the album yet. Leo Bryant—”

  “Helen,” she replied bluntly. “I think there’s an empty desk down by the slit-gongs.”

  “Thanks, I just started. You a curator?”

  Helen shook her head, rearranging the cassettes on the desk. “No. Inventory project.” Pointedly she moved his knapsack to the floor.

  “Me, too. Maybe we can work together sometime.”

  She glanced at his earnest face and smiled. “I like to work alone, thanks.” He looked hurt, and she added, “Nothing personal—I just like it that way. I’m sure we’ll run into each other. Nice to meet you, Leo.” She grabbed a stack of inventory sheets and walked away down the corridor.

  They met for coffee one morning. After a few weeks they met almost every morning, sometimes even for lunch outside on the Mall. During the day Leo wandered over from his cubicle in Ethnology to pass on departmental gossip. Sometimes they had a drink after work, but never often enough to invite gossip themselves. Helen was happy with this arrangement, the curators delighted to have such a worker as quiet, without ambition, punctual. Everyone except Leo left her to herself.

  Late one afternoon Helen turned at the wrong corner and found herself in a small cul-de-sac between stacks of crates that cut off light and air. She yawned, breathing the faint must of cinnamon bark as she traced her path on a crumpled inventory map. This narrow alley was unmarked; the adjoining corridors contained Malaysian artifacts, batik tools, long teak boxes of gongs. Fallen crates, clumsily hewn cartons overflowing with straw were scattered on the floor. Splintered panels snagged her sleeves as she edged her way down the aisle. A sweet musk hung about these cartons, the languorous essence of unknown blossoms.

  At the end of the cul-de-sac an entire row of crates had toppled, as though the weight of time had finally pitched them to the floor. Helen squatted and chose a box at random, a broad flat package like a portfolio. She pried the lid off to find a stack of leather cutouts curling with age, like desiccated cloth. She drew one carefully from the pile, frowning as its edges disintegrated at her touch. A shadow puppet, so fantastically elaborate that she couldn’t tell if it was male or female; it scarcely looked human. Light glimmered through the grotesque latticework as Helen jerked it back and forth, its pale shadow dancing across the wall. Then the puppet split and crumbled into brittle curlicues that formed strange hieroglyphics on the black marble floor. Swearing softly, Helen replaced the lid, then jammed the box back into the shadows. Her fingers brushed another crate, of smooth polished mahogany. It had a comfortable heft as she pulled it into her lap. Each corner of the narrow lid was fixed with a large, square-headed nail. Helen yanked these out and set each upright in a row.

  As she opened the box, dried flowers, seeds and wood shavings cascaded into her lap. She inhaled, closing her eyes, and imagined blue water and firelight, sweet-smelling seeds exploding in the embers. She sneezed and opened her eyes to a cloud of dust wafting from the crate like smoke. Very carefully she worked her fingers into the fragrant excelsior, kneading the petals gently until she grasped something brittle and solid. She drew this out in a flurry of dead flowers.

  It was a puppet: not a toy, but a gorgeously costumed figure, spindly arms clattering with glass and bone circlets, batik robes heavy with embroidery and beadwork. Long whittled pegs formed its torso and arms and the rods that swiveled it back and forth, so that its robes rippled tremulously, like a swallowtail’s wings. Held at arm’s length it gazed scornfully down at Helen, its face glinting with gilt paint. Sinuous vines twisted around each jointed arm. Flowers glowed within the rich threads of its robe, orchids blossoming in the folds of indigo cloth.

  Loveliest of all was its face, the curve of cheeks and chin so gracefully arched it might have been cast in gold rather than coaxed from wood. Helen brushed it with a finger: the glossy white paint gleamed as though still wet. She touched the carmine bow that formed its mouth, traced the jet-black lashes stippled across its brow, like a regiment of ants. The smooth wood felt warm to her touch as she stroked it with her fingertips. A courtesan might have perfected its sphinx’s smile; but in the tide of petals Helen discovered a slip of paper covered with spidery characters. Beneath the straggling script another hand had shaped clumsy block letters spelling out the name p
rince of flowers.

  Once, perhaps, an imperial concubine had entertained herself with its fey posturing, and so passed the wet silences of a long green season. For the rest of the afternoon it was Helen’s toy. She posed it and sent its robes dancing in the twilit room, the frail arms and tiny wrists twitching in a marionette’s waltz.

  Behind her a voice called, “Helen?”

  “Leo,” she murmured. “Look what I found.”

  He hunched beside her to peer at the figure. “Beautiful. Is that what you’re on now? Balinese artifacts?”

  She shrugged. “Is that what it is? I didn’t know.” She glanced down the dark rows of cabinets and sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be here. It’s just so hot—” She stretched and yawned as Leo slid the puppet from her hands.

  “Can I see it?” He twisted it until its head spun and the stiff arms flittered. “Wild. Like one of those dancers in The King and I.” He played with it absently, hypnotized by the swirling robes. When he stopped, the puppet jerked abruptly upright, its blank eyes staring at Helen.

  “Be careful,” she warned, kneading her smock between her thumbs. “It’s got to be a hundred years old.” She held out her hands and Leo returned it, bemused.

  “It’s wild, whatever it is.” He stood and stretched. “I’m going to get a soda. Want to come?”

  “I better get back to what I was working on. I’m supposed to finish the Burmese section this week.” Casually she set the puppet in its box, brushed the dried flowers from her lap and stood.

  “Sure you don’t want a soda or something?” Leo hedged plaintively, snapping his ID badge against his chest. “You said you were hot.”

  “No thanks,” Helen smiled wanly. “I’ll take a raincheck. Tomorrow.”

  Peeved, Leo muttered and stalked off. When his silhouette faded away she turned and quickly pulled the box into a dim corner. There she emptied her handbag and arranged the puppet at its bottom, wrapping Kleenex about its arms and face. Hairbrush, wallet, lipstick: all thrown back into her purse, hiding the puppet beneath their clutter. She repacked the crate with its sad array of blossoms, hammering the lid back with her shoe. Then she scrabbled in the corner on her knees until she located a space between stacks of cartons. With a resounding crack the empty box struck the wall, and Helen grinned as she kicked more boxes to fill the gap. Years from now another inventory technician would discover it and wonder, as she had countless times, what had once been inside the empty carton.

 

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