Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  “I repeat, nonsense! I have opened this body. I have breathed its dust. Do I look ill? Am I dead?"

  “I doubt it. You're not at all polite."

  The necromancer glowered. “You have only just noticed this, emperor?"

  It was true: the man's manner had always been abrasive to all, regardless of station.

  “Never believe what a victim tells you,” Destevard said. “Why—” he paused to chortle, not pleasantly—"I once met a man, briefly, who thought he had the plague because a flea had bitten him. He was dead, in fact. Dead for a very long time, until I called him forth. He was not one of these—” he waved his hand as if to grasp an elusive word, and ended by gesturing at the corpse—"these unnatural revenants that beset us nowadays."

  His eye drawn to the cadaver, Aubrun saw with a sinking heart that it was Ataglutisia, his principal leman. Detached from her chest, her springy breasts now lay on her slightly convex belly. Resting below her celebrated throat like a bib, her face had been peeled down from the raw bone beneath: not red, but black with the same dust that pooled beneath her body.

  “How—” the emperor suppressed a sob—"How did you manage to kill her?"

  “I didn't. She's no more nor less dead than she was when I enticed her into my workshop. Surgical instruments have no power to disrupt her non-existence."

  “Then she's alive?"

  The word “idiot” seemed to tremble visibly on Destevard's lips, but even he had tact enough to contain it. “She is shamming inanimation, because she thinks it's expected of her. These creatures are nothing if not obliging."

  Seizing on this suggestion, the emperor addressed the corpse: “Ataglutisia, please, I want you to talk to me—oh, no."

  The creature had appalled him by sitting up. With eyes unnaturally large and protuberant in its naked skull, it goggled down at its misplaced breasts. It picked them up and pressed them, not accurately, to the black wounds in its chest, where they clung. It flashed its ghastly face at Aubrun, who believed that one of her winsome smile was intended, rendered now impossible by the absence of lips, cheeks or eyelids. Reading the expression of loathing on his face, she pulled her own, detached face upward and attempted to fit it to her skull. The result was unspeakable.

  “You no longer find me pretty,” she sobbed, her expression caricaturing one of the pouts that could formerly have thrown the whole court into a paroxysm of solicitousness.

  As befitted the unspeakable, Aubrun could say nothing, but Destevard was unperturbed. Rising as close to gallantry as the emperor had ever heard him come, he said, “Cheer up, dear child. You are still lovely from the waist down."

  Aubrun seized him roughly by the sleeve and whispered harshly in his ear, “In the name of Thasaidon, you maniac, kill it!"

  Sighing, Destevard detached the sleeve of his enchanter's robe from Aubrun's grip with an elaborate pretense of patience. “If I were to chop her and mince her and serve her in a puree to Seferis Crod—although that would require force-feeding now, his appetite having deserted him—she would resume her present state. He would eventually excrete or regurgitate the corpse, with no great pain or permanent damage to either of them, or so my less elaborate experiments have shown."

  “Spare me details of these experiments—but have they led you to the origin of the dust? Where did it come from?"

  “What are we?” Destevard laughed for as long as thought prudent, but a glance at the emperor's face told him that this was not long at all. “Whence came we, and whither do we go? When a lad scuffs his knee or a scholar scratches his head or a rat gnaws a bone, dust is shed. It hangs about us, always, not just our dust, but the dust of the hundreds of thousands of generations that have gone before us on this ancient planet, the dust of cosmoses that collapsed long before the first man stared at a ray of sunlight and deemed it dusty. Mountains that once yearned toward the moon are dust, and so is the moon."

  “This is no answer at all."

  “Take heart from these resurrections, emperor. They mean that humanity is unwilling merely to flake away into the atmosphere, that our will to be up and about is greater even than the Pumiceous Principle that grinds down the universe. I believe that these dust-beings may not be proper corpses at all, but a new race, born to supplant us water-beings, who can no longer survive in our pulverescent world."

  “I fear that empty gabble has supplanted reasonable discourse in our pulverescent world,” the emperor gritted. “My poor subjects are dying, clearly. Can you suggest nothing we might do for them?"

  Much as he wanted to, the emperor had found it impossible to tear his eyes from his grotesquely transformed concubine. Only yesterday, all notions of beauty, wit, grace and charm had been meaningless without reference to Ataglutisia. Today those qualities might more profitably be sought in a sack of yams. Even the minimal dignity of a common corpse had been ravished by the necromancer's rude surgery.

  Sensing the trend of Aubrun's thoughts, Destevard said, “We can tidy them up, I suppose,” and he turned to manipulate Ataglutisia's face as a sculptor might work with clay. He glanced nervously at the emperor as he worked, and each glance made him more nervous. Aubrun's horror and loathing increased: not because Destevard was botching the work, for he was not, but because he was able to do such unnatural work at all. A living woman would have screamed or struggled against such treatment, but Ataglutisia sat passively as ungentle fingers pushed and gouged her skin into a tighter fit, pinched her nose back to its slender hauteur, plumped her legendary lips and squeezed her eyes into their seductive tilt...

  The necromancer was inordinately pleased with his handiwork when he stepped back for a better view, but Aubrun was appalled. Ataglutisia's face was even more beautiful than it had been in life, but in an idealized mode, like any one of the dozen wax goddesses that a curbside artist might produce for undiscriminating bumpkins in any hour. The masses might have groveled in adoration before such a creature, but Aubrun could barely stand to look at it. The necromancer had snuffed the last, lingering flicker of his lover's unique spark.

  The feelings of loss and helpless terror that had been growing in the emperor since he woke were unfamiliar to a man whose omnipotence had never been questioned. In fact he was unable to recognize them except as new kinds of pain, and his response to pain without relief had often been rage. It had taken no great leap to focus this rage on the bumptious necromancer. He felt he had restrained himself admirably until now; but now, when the arrogant wretch extended his reconstructive manipulations to Ataglutisia's misplaced breasts, his bony hands squeezing and fondling—yes, fondling, the filthy old lecher!—the flesh that Aubrun had deemed almost as sacred as his own, and no less protected from the casual liberties of others, he lurched forward with what promised to be a roar, but which twisted free of his throat as a disappointing squawk.

  The cry was so ineffective that Destevard was undistracted from his work. He failed to see that the emperor had seized the longest and heaviest of his surgical knives from the table beside him. He was less pained than surprised when the blade entered his back. He even seemed fleetingly pleased to note the sudden protuberance that pushed out his robe until he realized that the erection sprang from an unlikely spot just below his breast-bone.

  Aubrun wrenched the knife free, meaning to strike many more times, but he dropped it and screamed when an exhalation of black dust billowed from the wound.

  “You—you're dead!” the emperor cried.

  Destevard was at last stripped of his vain pretensions. He felt his wound, examined his black-stained hand, and collapsed in an undignified heap on the floor.

  “I wondered how I could touch her so and feel no stir of lust,” he groaned. “I ascribed it to old age. You have at least relieved my anxieties about that, emperor."

  “Are we all dead, then?” Aubrun quavered as he backed away. “Am I?"

  “I suppose so. With all due respect, it hardly seems important to me anymore."

  Aubrun rejected the notion that he was dea
d. He could not believe that a dead man would have felt jealous rage, or would now feel such acute discomfort at sharing a room with two other corpses. Her face a serene tribute to the necromancer's vulgar taste, Ataglutisia dutifully followed her master as he stumbled toward the door, ignoring his mute and tearful efforts to wave her back.

  Aubrun recoiled when a cockroach crossed his path at a most uncharacteristic, leisurely gait. A large part of the his time had always been spent pointing out these creatures for lesser mortals to step on. Although he had no wish to encourage Ataglutisia by charging her with an imperial command, he gestured at the bug by reflex, and she stepped forward to squash it with her bare foot. Aubrun stared at the wisp of black dust that jetted from the crushed bug through her pretty toes.

  “So much for your theory of the unique pertinacity of the human spirit!” he snarled at Destevard as the cockroach resumed its interrupted stroll.

  Aubrun stopped trying to discourage his leman from following him when he determined to leave the tomb that his palace had become. He had never before walked alone into the teeming streets of Miraab. From his earliest days it had been drummed into him that an emperor could venture among the common people only on horseback, surrounded by four impregnable walls of pikemen and archers, and only after his route had been swept clean of his more unsightly, felonious and infectious subjects. But now he could find no one to saddle his horse, marshal his guards, or even dress him or comb his hair. If he wanted to see for himself the doom that had come to his capital city, he would have to go forth on foot and in his nightshirt, a feat that towered in his imagination above the highest deeds of the Emperor Agramendax. On such an adventure, he welcomed even the company of a naked corpse.

  But the streets, always so enticing in their glitter and bustle at any hour of the day or night from the vantage of his high windows, were a sorry disappointment. The infamous wineshops and brothels were dark, the bazaars were empty. The streets were lighted only by a burning building here and there, fires that raged unfought and largely unremarked. A few pedestrians shuffled through the dust, but most of the people sat in slack knots at street-corners. Passing through them, Aubrun eavesdropped on dozens of droning monologues on the boredom of life, as they persisted in calling their state, that never quite meshed as conversations. Not even the presence of their emperor or the unveiled charms of the empire's foremost beauty aroused much notice, although they would reply politely enough if Aubrun greeted them.

  “I fear I am the last living man in Miraab,” he confided to a drab man who still made a pretense of tending a goat's-meat brazier.

  “Forgive me, your majesty, but I'm alive, too,” this person whispered. “I think it would be bad for business if I let it be known."

  “You mean you do business, still?"

  “No, not really. But it could always get worse."

  Insofar as the pedestrians were going anywhere, they tended toward the precincts of the necropolis, beyond the open and unguarded gates of the city, so the emperor turned his steps in that direction. The darkness in this area was impenetrable, and he stumbled over someone who cried out an obscene protest in a singularly unpleasant voice.

  “Know, wretch, that I am your emperor!” Aubrun cried, shocked by the other's words.

  “No, you're not. I am a ghoul, and all men are equal in my eyes."

  Aubrun couldn't doubt this as the ghoul sat up and he dimly discerned its beastly muzzle and misshapen frame. Most convincing of all was its vile odor.

  Aubrun shook so with fear that he could barely force his lips to form words, but he said, “And are you dying of the dust, too? Is that why you lie here?"

  “Ghouls are spirits, and spirits can't die. We can't really live, either. We can only manifest ourselves. Since none of my comrades has done that lately, I assume that I am the last visible, tangible, fully manifest ghoul in Miraab.” He added, “Tremble, mortal!” The terror of this shriek was mitigated by the racking cough it provoked.

  “Why have your comrades left you, and why are you ill, if not from the dust? Are you hungry? Can't these walking corpses sustain you?"

  “We don't need to eat the dead. We do so for sport, much as you might drink wine. I could eat your whore, here, yes, but it would be no more intoxicating than drinking water. Our true food is spiritual. We thrive on human rapacity. When husbands tear rings from their dead wives’ fingers, when children hustle their parents into the grave, when dwarfs arrogate to themselves the finery of dead giants, ghouls prosper and rejoice. Among these passionless dead, we starve.” He coughed again, less strongly. “I fear you have dealt me a serious, spiritual wound, Emperor of Tasuun, you and your misplaced concern for my plight."

  “I'm sorry, it was not my—"

  “Damn you!” the ghoul shrieked in a weirdly retrocessive way, and vanished.

  A humpback moon dragged itself above low dust-clouds to whiten monuments and bones. Ataglutisia gleamed like bare ivory. By moonlight she didn't look at all dead, merely abstracted, and Aubrun was surprised that the sight of her evoked in him such a violent and dual passion.

  “I know I can't hurt you, but forgive me anyway,” he gasped, dragging her down roughly. “It's my intention to kill myself by love."

  “It would be nice if you became like everyone else."

  He kissed her so hard that dust spilled from her lip, and he drank it down. He sliced her buttocks with his fingernails and licked off the trickling dust. He rooted between her legs, sucking out the oozing dust.

  “Yes, my emperor, my love, yes yes yes,” she droned, and she accepted his member skillfully when it brushed the lips that had been praised in some very naughty sonnets, but with no more ardor than a preoccupied invalid might accept a physician's tongue-depressor.

  “Damn you, dead bitch, kill me!” Aubrun sobbed, and he had hopes that it was dust he ejaculated, but it wasn't. She gagged, as she never had, and was forced to spit it out with pallid apologies.

  He was very short of breath for a while, and he took heart from this, but he recovered.

  “Was it good for you?” she asked.

  A breeze arose with the dawn, a curiously uninterrupted breeze that kept growing stronger. Black clouds rose in serpentine contortions to mask the city and then to mask the farther reaches of the necropolis. Aubrun cried out with alarm when some of the dead in the near distance began shredding away, their bodies disintegrating before his eyes and being sucked up by the twisting wind. When he tried to stand, he was buffeted back to the ground, but his flimsy garment was torn away to vanish into the sky.

  Ataglutisia gave a curiously lifelike little cry that tore his heart, it reminded him so of the way she had been. He turned to see an expression of genuine emotion on her face, one that he never forgot; unhappily, it was a look of stark terror as her flesh and bones evaporated into the voracious sky.

  The wind stopped, leaving the air like crystal, as it had not been for many, many days. The glorious city of Miraab stood revealed as an eroded ruin, as unpeopled as the pinkish desert that surrounded it.

  Aubrun realized that his spontaneous cry was inappropriately gleeful for an emperor whose empire had just received a mortal blow, but the sight of the desert in its familiar hues, not at all black, gladdened his heart. An unnatural twilight prevailed, though, darkening the colors but not deleting them, and he assumed the insidious dust had risen to a cloud that blocked the sun but would presently blow away, perhaps to descend next on some richly deserving neighbor-kingdom.

  He looked up to check the truth of this assumption, and he screamed.

  The boulders that oppressed the earth behind him were toes. The picture of Ataglutisia squashing the cockroach returned acutely to his mind. The proud towers that challenged the sky were legs, female legs that would have been considered sublimely formed if they had been a hundred times smaller. The double-valved temple doors by which a whole hierarchy of corpulent priests might enter in quadruple file, never to return, was a vulva of stupendous dimensions. Vertigo overcame
him as he stared beyond the mountains of the breasts, but perhaps it was horror, for he heard himself gibbering witlessly as he recognized the face that was tilted inexorably in his direction.

  More properly, he recognized the new face that Destevard Hooven had fashioned for Ataglutisia, and he realized why it had made him think of religious sculptures: it was the face of Alila, goddess of all iniquities, once the principal divinity of Miraab, but whose worship had fallen into decline since his own accession to the throne.

  “What would you have of me?” Aubrun cried.

  “I have it all,” a voice replied—not at all the cracking thunder he had anticipated, but a sweetly insinuating voice, differing only from normal speech in that it seemed like a voice inside his head that he might hear upon the instant of waking. “I have your empire, Aubrun, your silks and cities and cataphracts, your children and concubines with all their torques and carcanets. And, oh, yes, your subjects. I leave you your life, but spare me your gratitude. It is a gift you will hate with a passion that would have been worthy of my service."

  “What have I done, Goddess?"

  “Nothing. You have neglected my worship. You have not tormented the sick, defiled the dead nor mocked the bereaved, neither yet have you flayed the naked, nor yet have you starved the hungry, neither yet have you made the little children suffer for my name's sake. On the contrary, you have oversmeared your empire with a sticky spirit of benevolence and tolerated all but the most egregious excesses of the pure in heart."

  Casting desperately for justification in some iniquity he had committed, an act he regretted, Aubrun protested, “I had a poet flogged once, one who had written naughty sonnets about my principal leman."

  “Fool! That was my beloved son, in whom I was well pleased.” Turning and walking away on monstrous but silent feet, the goddess repeated a common valediction: “May you reign ten thousand years, O Mighty Emperor!"

  Staring after her with intense relief, Aubrun was shocked to catch himself admiring the clenching and unclenching of her buttocks as she walked, even more so after distance had diminished them to manageable size.