by Laird Barron
Julia sets down the tin containers filled with food and goes behind the ropes, standing on her tiptoes to look at Jack. It’s Monday and the museum is closed but Father still goes to the office. It’s Monday and it means there is no one to interrupt her. She removes Jack’s hat. She sets it on her head.
She tilts her head and stares at him. She brushes the knot of his necktie.
Finally, she sets the hat back on his head, jumps down and continues on to Father’s office.
The teacher speaks of the Aztecs. Speaks of sacrifice. Of the tonacayotl, the spiritual flesh-hood. We only exist thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. There is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The Aztecs pierced their body with maguey thorns, drawing blood from their tongues, their ear lobes, their feet, their genitals. Offerings written in blood.
Julia draws a snake. It curls on the page of her notebook, growing in size. She adds details: tiny little crosshatches for the skin, a forked tongue.
The teacher assigns partners for a project. Julia will work with David.
David lives four blocks from Julia’s house. His father owns a small convenience store. Julia has seen the boy there, with a green apron tied around his waist, assembling pyramids made out of soup cans.
David proposes that they consult his leather-bound encyclopedia for the project and Julia agrees. Julia sits on the floor of his living room while he turns the pages. An image of a sacrifice taken from a codex catches her attention and she places her palm upon the page, staring at it.
David turns on the radio. He pours her a glass of soda.
He has no siblings. The music echoes through his apartment without the wailing of a baby punctuating it in the background. She finds that odd.
While she looks at the picture, David’s hand falls upon her knee, brushing the hem of her skirt.
He should not touch her and she should remind him of this. She makes no effort to move the hand away. The touch irritates her, but she is also curious. She wonders whether he will attempt to move his hand higher. The hand remains at her knee and eventually she stands up, tossing the remains of her soda in the kitchen sink.
David walks Julia home a few times. She does nothing to encourage him or to refuse him. They walk together but she feels as though he was at a great distance. Curiosity and indifference mix together.
Twice a week David’s father has him come in to the store to work the cash register. One afternoon, David gives her a grand tour of the premises. He takes her to the storage room and they sit behind a pile of cardboard boxes. He runs a sweaty palm across her knees, touches her. Julia stares at a box filled with tuna cans. She leaves half an hour later, after purchasing milk and coffee for her mother.
In her bed that night she thinks about the tonacayotl. Everything is but one flesh. The world is but an illusion. Omeyocan. The dual space, the dual time. Everything is immaterial, innate, eternal, without beginning or end. We are but the manifestation of the gods, a fleck in the double pupil of Ometeötl. Everything dies, everything is abandoned, everything exists again and remains.
If time and flesh are an illusion…well, then…
Julia lays still upon the bed and relaxes her limbs. She breaths slowly, until her body feels very light. Until her body seems to drip onto the bed, through the bed, down. It sinks. The sounds of the city morph into sounds of carriages and horses. An unusual cold drifts into the room. She hears the patter of the rain upon cobblestones. Her bedroom window seems narrower and fog whirls outside, hiding the buildings and the sky.
A shadow drifts across the room, towards her. He stands in the ghostly light that filters through the yellowed curtains.
She knows his face. She knows his smile.
He lowers the knife, plunging it deep into her stomach.
She screams.
In the morning she wakes to find blood on her thighs. Her period has arrived.
She showers and when she emerges the bathroom is filled with steam. The mirror has clouded. She traces a serpent upon its surface, then wipes it off with the palm of her hand. She observes her reflection.
The bodies of war captives were carefully handled. The locks to the captor, the heart to the Sun, the head skewered onto a skull rack. David’s encyclopedia provides facts, words, pictures, but no knowledge.
Julia sits cross-legged, turning the pages. She asks David for the J volume, asks him if he’s heard about Jack Ripper. David turns the volume of the stereo higher, making the walls of the apartment reverberate.
He rubs her legs and touches her arms. She feels like a doll that is being maneuvered into different poses. Her body feels like it is made of rubber or wax.
She asks David if he believes that all flesh is but an illusion but the music is loud and he isn’t listening.
Julia sinks into the sheets, drowns upon the bed. Her whole body dissolves, ceases to be, is assembled again. She resurfaces in the room she’s seen before—his room—to the scent of incense, the sound of rain upon the streets.
He comes into focus, a blurry figure at first, his face growing clearer. Jack’s eyes narrow when he sees her.
She breaths slowly.
Her mouth is dry.
He nicks her with his knife. He cuts her arm. Tiny, sharp, little cuts.
But she doesn’t mind. This is the art of sacrifice. Thorns and bones and blades to make the body sing.
There’s an anatomical illustration of a man and a woman, their skin removed, that she enjoys looking at. The illustration consists of several layers of acetate that you can flip on or off. Flip and you reveal the muscles. Flip again and see the veins. Flip to see the naked skeleton.
Peeling layers of reality. This is exactly what the Aztecs understood.
David looks at her with a bored expression as she spreads his books on the floor. He has no use for books. Those are his parents’ things, tomes that contain no useful lessons for him.
Julia agrees. The pages cannot hold knowledge. Only the body—fragile, immaterial as it is—can hope to transmit a hint of truths.
David understands only the body. She does not fault him for it. The language of hands, nails, tongue is as honest as any saga upon the printed page.
But David only understands the first layer. The skin and the flesh. He cannot peel the acetate to reveal the muscle and blood. He does not see the shape of her skull beneath her face.
Perhaps she should be content with this one layer of truth, this slim understanding.
She can’t. She just can’t.
She takes David to the museum, to see Jack. David acts like he is not impressed by the chamber of horrors. He laughs at the mummies and snorts at the witches. When they reach Jack, Julia tells him about the crimes.
David has been all laughter and bluster, but as they stand in front of this wax figure, he seems to shrink a bit. What are we doing here when we could be at the movies? he asks. Beneath the irritation there is a hint of dread.
Julia says nothing. The feeling of distance, of disinterest, invades her once more.
He runs his hands down her arm. He wants to do something fun. He wants to make out. Sex. It’s all David understands.
David understands nothing.
“Not now,” she says, her eyes upon Jack.
David kisses her, wraps his arms around her. His insistent hand palms her breast, as if he were kneading dough.
She bites down on his lip. She bites down until it bleeds. David yelps like a puppy.
He shoves her away and rushes out of the chamber of horrors with an angry curse.
Julia stumbles and falls in front of Jack, bruising her knees. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
David walks another girl home. Julia watches them with the same vague indifference as before. Her mother sends her to buy eggs at the little store and when she comes in, David ignores her, busy rearranging some cans.
When she returns home, her mother tells her to cook some eggs. Mother is busy with the twins and the other children are hungry. Julia cracks a
n egg. It is bloody in the centre. She stirs it with a wooden spoon, as though she were scrying. The egg burns.
She touches the tiny points on her arm were Jack nicked her with his knife.
Julia pictures the universe like an infinite, incessant assembly of fractals branching out into forever. She sinks into them. Cahuitl, the Aztec word for space, derives from the word for abandon. To abandon oneself. And so she abandons herself upon her bed—which is no longer her bed. She opens her eyes to a room that is not her room.
But in the currents of time and being, here can be there.
The light from an oil lamp washes the room in warm yellows and browns. A sweet, pungent scent clouds the room. A man rises from a chair and gazes at her with familiar eyes.
She peels off her nightgown and prepares for the knife to nick her stomach. He spreads open her legs instead, digs his finger into her flesh until he draws bruises.
The scent in the room is the memory of altars and incense.
The rains have arrived. Julia watches the water swirl into the sewer grate. She waits under an umbrella until David walks by. He hasn’t spoken to her in several weeks, but he turns his head when she calls his name, like a charm.
It’s Monday. The museum is closed, but she always has access to its wax figures and its hallways.
She asks him if he’d like to go with her.
He looks reluctant only for a second. She knows, by the way he smiles, that he’s been expecting this. In some corner of his mind he’s thought she’d pursue him, grovel, beg for his renewed attentions.
She takes him to the chamber of horrors. She goes behind the velvet rope, behind Jack, and sits on the bed. David’s eagerness has subsided.
Yes it’s dark here, she says. No one comes here. No one can see us.
He hesitates. She casts off her sweater and her shirt and David follows her to the bed. He pinches her nipple, tries to get on top of her.
Julia reaches beneath her and firmly clutches the knife, making a firm cut. Warm blood splutters upon her chest. She strikes again. Again. Again. And David slides down, wriggling, twisting.
Julia holds up her hand. It’s stained crimson. She rubs her hand against her lips and heads towards Jack. She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him. She can feel the acetate film of the here and now peeling off, like a dead skin.
His waxen flesh grows warm.
His mouth tastes of incense.
God of the Razor
Joe R. Lansdale
Richards arrived at the house about eight.
The moon was full and it was a very bright night, in spite of occasional cloud cover; bright enough that he could get a good look at the place. It was just as the owner had described it. Run down. Old. And very ugly.
The style was sort of gothic, sort of plantation, sort of cracker box. Like maybe the architect had been unable to decide on a game plan, or had been drunkenly in love with impossible angles.
Digging the key loaned him from his pocket, he hoped this would turn out worth the trip. More than once his search for antiques had turned into a wild goose chase. And this time, it was really a long shot. The owner, a sick old man named Klein, hadn’t been inside the house in twenty years. A lot of things could happen to antiques in that time, even if the place was locked and boarded up. Theft. Insects. Rats. Leaks. Any one of those, or a combination of, could turn the finest of furniture into rubble and sawdust in no time. But it was worth the gamble. On occasion, his luck had been phenomenal.
As a thick, dark cloud rolled across the moon, Richards, guided by his flashlight, mounted the rickety porch, squeaked the screen and groaned the door open.
Inside, he flashed the light around. Dust and darkness seemed to crawl in there until the cloud passed and the lunar light fell through the boarded windows in a speckled and slatted design akin to camouflaged netting. In places, Richards could see that the wallpaper had fallen from the wall in big sheets that dangled halfway down to the floor like the drooping branches of weeping willows.
To his left was a wide, spiraling staircase, and following its ascent with his light, he could see there were places where the railing hung brokenly askew.
Directly across from this was a door. A narrow, recessed one. As there was nothing in the present room to command his attention, he decided to begin his investigation there. It was as good a place as any.
Using his flashlight to bat his way through a skin of cobwebs, he went over to the door and opened it. Cold air embraced him, brought with it a sour smell, like a freezer full of ruined meat. It was almost enough to turn Richards’ stomach, and for a moment he started to close the door and forget it. But an image of wall-to-wall antiques clustered in the shadows came to mind, and he pushed forward, determined. If he were going to go to all the trouble to get the key and drive way out here in search of old furniture to buy, then he ought to make sure he had a good look, smell or no smell.
Using his flash, and helped by the moonlight, he could tell that he had discovered a basement. The steps leading down into it looked aged and precarious, and the floor appeared oddly glass-like in the beam of his light.
So he could examine every nook and cranny of the basement, Richards decided to descend the stairs. He put one foot carefully on the first step, and slowly settled his weight on it. Nothing collapsed. He went down three more steps, cautiously, and though they moaned and squeaked, they held.
When Richards reached the sixth step, for some reason he could not define, he felt oddly uncomfortable, had a chill. It was as if someone with ice-cold water in their kidneys had taken a piss down the back of his coat collar.
Now he could see that the floor was not glassy at all. In fact, the floor was not visible. The reason it had looked glassy from above was because it was flooded with water. From the overall size of the basement, Richards determined that the water was most likely six or seven feet deep. Maybe more.
There was movement at the edge of Richards’ flashlight beam, and he followed it. A huge rat was swimming away from him, pushing something before it; an old partially deflated volleyball perhaps. He could not tell for sure. Nor could he decide if the rat was trying to mount the object or bite it.
And he didn’t care. Two things that gave him the willies were rats and water, and here were both. To make it worse, the rats were the biggest he’d ever seen, and the water was the dirtiest imaginable. It looked to have a lot of oil and sludge mixed in with it, as well as being stagnant.
It grew darker, and Richards realized the moon had been hazed by a cloud again. He let that be his signal. There was nothing more to see here, so he turned and started up. Stopped. The very large shape of a man filled the doorway. Richards jerked the light up, saw that the shadows had been playing tricks on him. The man was not as large as he’d first thought. And he wasn’t wearing a hat. He had been certain before that he was, but he could see now that he was mistaken. The fellow was bareheaded, and his features, though youthful, were undistinguished; any character he might have had seemed to retreat into the flesh of his face or find sanctuary within the dark folds of his shaggy hair. As he lowered the light, Richards thought he saw the wink of braces on the young man’s teeth.
“Basements aren’t worth a damn in this part of the country,” the young man said. “Must have been some Yankees come down here and built this. Someone who didn’t know about the water table, the weather and all.”
“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Richards said. “Klein send you?”
“Don’t know a Klein.”
“He owns the place. Loaned me a key.”
The young man was silent a moment. “Did you know the moon is behind a cloud? A cloud across the moon can change the entire face of the night. Change it the way some people change their clothes, their moods, their expressions.”
Richards shifted uncomfortably.
“You know,” the young man said. “I couldn’t shave this morning.”
“Beg pardon?”
“When I tried to put a bl
ade in my razor, I saw that it had an eye on it, and it was blinking at me, very fast. Like this… oh, you can’t see from down there, can you? Well, it was very fast. I dropped it and it slid along the sink, dove off on the floor, crawled up the side of the bathtub and got in the soap dish. It closed its eye then, but it started mewing like a kitten wanting milk. Ooooowwwwaaa, Oooowwwaa, was more the way it sounded really, but it reminded me of a kitten. I knew what it wanted, of course. What it always wants. What all the sharp things want.
“Knowing what it wanted made me sick and I threw up in the toilet. Vomited up a razor blade. It was so fat it might have been pregnant. Its eye was blinking at me as I flushed it. When it was gone the blade in the soap dish started to sing high and silly-like.
“The blade I vomited, I know how it got inside of me.” The young man raised his fingers to his throat. “There was a little red mark right here this morning, and it was starting to scab over. One or two of them always find a way in. Sometimes it’s nails that get in me. They used to come in through the soles of my feet while I slept, but I stopped that pretty good by wearing my shoes to bed.”
In spite of the cool of the basement, Richards had started to sweat. He considered the possibility of rushing the guy or just trying to push past him, but dismissed it. The stairs might be too weak for sudden movement, and maybe the fruitcake might just have his say and go on his way.
“It really doesn’t matter how hard I try to trick them,” the young man continued, “they always win out in the end. Always.”
“I think I’ll come up now,” Richards said, trying very hard to sound casual.
The young man flexed his legs. The stairs shook and squealed in protest. Richards nearly toppled backward into the water.
“Hey!” Richards yelled.
“Bad shape,” the young man said. “Need a lot of work. Rebuilt entirely would be the ticket.”
