by Laird Barron
I follow the voice to the pedestal, and to the large rosebud balanced delicately on its stem like a spinning top. I look for the first time at “Rose,” this limbless, hairless warbling thing, red as the flames of Hell, and when I stretch out my fingers, the petals shudder and slowly unfurl.
“Miss?” The gentleman sounds small and jittery as he descends the last few stairs, hands outstretched and shoes scraping the floor. “Miss? What's happening to me?”
When he enters my candlelight, I shrink back in terror. The man stands straight as a soldier, but when he tilts his head, his facial features don't move in conjunction. There's a delay, making a droopy porridge of his face, the skin floating free on the bone and his voice trapped beneath until it finds an opening in his skull.
I beg the cove to leave me alone. He don't listen, but don't come for me neither. He goes for the rose on the pedestal, dripping with hunger and face melting over the petals like butter on a summer stoop. The rose sings, and the man sings, and in every mirror, dozens of faces bulge and sing out a ghostly harmony. The rose maws wide and sprouts shiny black pimples leaking fat pearls of milk. Mirrors and growths and lost souls sing as one, and as the cove tilts back his head and his face slides to a wrinkled mass at his hairline, the rose's voice twists into something I understand.
“Beauty,” it says.
The man repeats the word, his voice like a trapped fart until his lips catch up with an opening in the bone. “Yes,” he wheezes. “I need beauty.”
“We all do. That's why it's the hardest itch to scratch,” says the damp and undulating rose. “Everyone's fighting to get at it, but even when you get a sniff you lose it quick. Beauty's as fickle as the sky, as poisonous as hate. It is heavier and more addictive than any drug on earth. It is a veil, it is a villain. It binds you up with painted lips and dark eyes and soft human skin. Whatever the pleasing shape, our minds are death-struck with worship.” The rose laughs like music. “But it's not real. Deep down you know it, and worst of all, you also know there's no easier gaff in the world. Beauty is an empty promise, and men like you march into it day after day, thinking this time beauty will give you eternal life. Do you not feel pathetic?”
He nods stiffly. “Yes, Madam.”
“Would you like eternal life?”
“Yes, Madam.”
“Cross the street then, darling. Give us your love, and we will give you all you seek.” The petals flex and the pimples spit. “Do we have an accord?”
He gathers his face in his hands and says, “Yes, Madam.”
“Good. And bring the little bitch with you.”
The man's facial features fall sluggishly back in place and he glares at me with eyes as colorless and empty as Ma's. He latches onto my arm and smacks the candelabra out of my hand, extinguishing the last flame. His grip is tighter in the dark. I ain't even a whore yet, and his fingers are in me, piercing and stretching my flesh like the mirrored faces and their dutiful boneboxes sucking on the words of Rose's alien song. He drags me screaming up the devil's wooden teeth and through the door where the other littles are gathered, gawking and outraged and dried up as death in their freakish masks.
They can't help me—too much risk. As the man drags me through the hall, Mary is the only one to move. With a shaky but toothy grin, she scuttles ahead of us and opens the front door.
The big house is open now too. Warm light oozes around Miss Jennie's body as she steps outside and tilts her head to the little girl across the street who dared to be a woman. I scream and struggle with the ruffian, but the ground shuts me up quick when he pushes me from the stoop. Blood bursts from my nose when I land, and pain rings through my jaw as the scars of Rose's song weeps acidic down my throat. The exquisite and horrific words that colored sixteen years of life taste like salt, inflaming my throat with squirming secrets.
The cove nicks me from the ground and drags me across the street, and no one says a word. Why would they? Even if he's fixing to kill me, what's another dead girl in the Points? The rain carries away my blood to the oblivion binding me and countless bastards with the bad fortune to be shat out on Amity. In a few months, it'll be like I never existed, and fuck me, I don't think I've ever been so relieved. To die without the burden of memory, with no one to cry for or curse me. The sun will still rise each day, men will lose their heads in opiate beauty, and Miss Jennie will greet the world as she greets me now, arms open and shadows unfurling.
Her countenance swallows us up, whisking us into a strange, crimson foyer where ceiling-length draperies closes us off from the rest of the house. Standing before the curtain, the Madam of Amity appears made of it, her dark gray trappings shifting to match her rose brooch, the drapes, and the blood still trickling from my nose. The few times I saw her from the street, she didn't look old exactly, but she didn't look this youthful. Her skin is smooth and tight as mine, and her lips are full, bright tulips breaking through a late frost. Her age ain't up for question, though. It's in her hips—the way she stands cocked with that confident grace that makes you feel like a numbskull babe pleading to suckle at her teat. She is the queen of all she surveys, and right now, she's staring twin gouges into my very soul.
The man is in the curtains searching for a slit, but he quickly gets lost and tangled and weeps for the madam's help.
She rescues the flustered gent, and in an unmistakably melodic voice says, “Move a muscle before I say so and no sweeties for you.”
He clenches every muscle in his body, and her focus shoots back at me.
“You're early,” she says.
I try to sniff back the blood, but my sinuses thunder with pain. Clutching my face, I moan and beg for forgiveness. “It was an accident, madam. I'm being square. I've been good and done what I was told all these years. I wouldn't dream of defying you. I want nothing more than to be one of your girls.”
As she marches forward, she catches the drapes in her whirlwind, fluttering them apart with glimpses of the silky, glittering women behind the curtains. They look like royalty in their gowns and jewels, but the rose pinned to each of their chests sparkles brightest, plush and dewy, even finer than Miss Jennie's.
The man's pale eyes roll wild in his skull, and tears stream down his cheeks as he fights to remain still. Miss Jennie hums as she thumbs a tear from his cheek and presses it to her lips.
“Don't waste a drop, darling. They sure as shit won't.”
The finest ladies in New York dance like flames through the drapery slits, and sweat runs heavy down the cove's brow. They blow him kisses, writhing in impatience as Miss Jennie slithers closer and plants her cheek against his.
“Would you like that, sir? For my girls to suck and fuck you dry?”
He sobs with joy and nods with his hands in prayer.
“Remove your clothes.”
I've never seen someone strip off their togs so quick. He is pale and fleshy and a slobbering mess when curtains part wide. In the moments before he throws himself to the wolves, I scan the faces of my future on the other side. The women are smiling and sighing and twisting their bodies together like maypole ribbons, so much that I can't tell where one girl begins and the other ends.
Miss Jennie sifts through his belongings, pocketing the money from his billfold and an engraved silver timepiece that would feed the little house for near a month.
“You're robbing him? Aren't you afraid he'll squeal?” I ask her.
“I'm not afraid of anything,” she says, tossing his clothes to the floor. “Certainly not a walking bone-on who didn't have the good sense to keep out of the devil's cellar. Then again,” she says, glaring at me, “you didn't either.”
“I didn't know what was down there, I swear. For God's sake, I still don't. All my life, I thought Rose was a girl. I thought she was one of us.”
Jennie cradles her rose brooch as if calming a crying infant. “It is part of us, without question,” she says. “Besides, no matter how you fair in this test, you will always be one of my girls.” She is inches fro
m me, standing in a way that unhinges her nonchalance. Her eyes glitter with something between fascination and sorrow, and she runs her fingers through my soggy limp hair.
“Is that what you told Pinky?”
She bats her eyelashes. “Pinky? Was that the last one?”
“You didn't even know her name?”
“I don't know yours either, dear.” She tilts her head as she smirks, and shadows streak the left side of her face. There are extra decades in the darkness, more creases around the hollows, more age spots on the mounds.
“It gave me no pleasure to turn Pinky away, I promise you, but she wasn't a good fit. She was a pretty one, though. I've no doubt she made a good life for herself.”
“She's rotting in the Bowery,” I barked. “I saw her less than a year ago. Her skin was falling off, and she was covered in boils like the ones on that rose in the cellar. She was dying.”
“I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm not sorry I dismissed her. Her insides weren't right, and I didn't want to put my healthy girls at risk.”
The flapping curtains catch my attention with slits of flesh and sounds of pleasure. They're passing the man around. He is at first on my left, then tangled in a knot of women on my right, and all around me, their tongues flick out the words of the devil-girl's song.
“Do you like what you see?” Miss Jennie asks me.
“I don't know what I see.”
Her hands melt over my shoulders as she draws her chest to my back, the rose brooch sticking my spine. “It is your heritage, darling. Ancient, noble, and unyielding.”
“I don't understand. Who are you? Are you the devil?”
Miss Jennie throws her head back with laughter. “Oh sweetheart, the devil's a gaff like any other. God, too, if you want the truth. There are creatures more glorious and terrifying in this world than any silly little bedtime story. And you are one of them.”
The man is a tent pole on which the women stretch themselves. He is a fire hydrant in which they frolic and bathe and drink until he is shrunken and husked, and they glow heavenly bright between fiery feathers of drapery.
Jennie grabs my chin with one hand, digging her fingers into my flesh and squeezing my skull like a tomato that spatters pulp and pain to every facet of my face.
“Open your mouth.”
I shake my head, and her nails pierce my skin with alarming ease. I am her pin cushion. I am warm tallow in her fist.
“Open your mouth, bastard, or I'll rip your goddamn jaw off.”
Tears run down my cheeks as I open wide and let the Madam of Amity inspect me like a prize heifer.
She hums as she peers into me, then releases my chin. Turning to the shadow, the decades rise to the surface of her skin again, and Miss Jennie looks her age. But where there are wrinkles, there are also scales. Where there is dimpled flesh, there are wet and drifting islands of crusted pus. And where there is one Madam of Amity, there are many—a clonal colony of women writhing in the darkness with the shriveled udder of a gentleman coiled in their serpentine bodies. They are the same cherubic nymphs they were at sixteen, but in the spaces between, they are slick with scurf, united by disease and fleshy tentacles branching throughout the big house like a hellish root system.
For years I thought the devil had roots in the cellar, but if the devil's just a gaff, so is the location of the roots. They ain't confined to the little house. They're in Miss Jennie's boarding house too. They're in the women of 17 Amity Street. And they're in me.
Pain stabs my chest, and it feels as though my racing heart will rocket through my breastbone. The agony empties my lungs, and I sink to my knees, clutching my chest like I can stop the wretched tunneling thing inside.
But it's too late. I'm in bloom.
The rosebud cracks through my sternum like it's iron but unfolds like the first flower in Eden. It's not pain that ravages me now, nor pleasure or any sensation I've felt in my little freak show life so far. It rivets my senses and deciphers the scarring on my soul. At last I understand the words. Ancient, noble, and unyielding, my heritage is the past and future of this world.
The cove appears between their fleshy trunks, and as they push him through the curtains, his virility returns. He is plump again and his eyes sparkle with color as he dresses.
“Were they to your satisfaction, sir?” Miss Jennie asks, knotting his tie.
“Better than I imagined.”
“You will tell your companions about us, won't you? I love our location, but I long for expansion. Bigger houses, more boarders, all the world over.”
With a bow, he says, “I'm your humble servant, Madam.”
She thanks him and opens the door. A man in a tuxedo is standing in the rain, poised to pluck the ribbon when the satisfied customer exits, tipping his hat to the waiting gent.
“One moment, sir,” she says.” I promise it'll be worth it.”
Closing the door, she fixes her sights on me and exhales heavily. “Are you ready, girl?”
“Me? I don't know how—“
“To sing? Come now, you know the words.”
“Sing?”
She grasps the rose protruding from my breastbone and snaps the stem, sending bolts of nauseating grief throughout my body. Removing her rose pin reveals a cavernous tunnel in her chest. Roots snake from the opening, crisscrossing my rose and pulling my wriggling bloom into Miss Jennie's body. The flower moves under her skin, down her ribcage and legs, through her tentacles, and into the moist earth below, where I feel each stone and smell of every worm as my roots crawl under Amity, up through the pedestal, back into the cellar of the little house.
Pinning her brooch in place, she says, “You will take him to the freak show”
“No, please don't make me go back there,” I plead, clutching my empty breast.
Pinning her brooch in place, she says, “You will take him to the freak show.” After wiping the blood from my face, she drapes it around my shoulders and conceals the broken stem in my chest.
“You wanted to be one of us, but you let one of us die. Do you think we couldn't hear our sister screaming down there while you did nothing? She wasn't blessed with beauty like you and me, but she survived her heritage with grace and strength when your precious Pinky couldn't even manage a year.”
“I said I was sorry! It was an accident!”
She smirks. “Which little house girl will say that about you, I wonder.” Opening, the door, Miss Jennie greets the gent and apologizes.
“My ladies are eager to meet you, sir, but they require some preparation. In the meantime, please enjoy a complimentary tour of my house of human oddities across the street. In the cellar, there is a creature so rare and intoxicating, you'd swear she was sired by the devil itself.”
When intrigue lights up his face, she gives me a shove. “This young woman will escort you.”
He greets me with a tip of his hat. “And what might your name be, miss?”
Miss Jennie squeezes my shoulder. “Call her 'Ma.'”
RED STARS / WHITE SNOW / BLACK METAL
by Fiona Maeve Geist
She woke up feeling scummy as if even her bones were vomiting. A barbed venomous deluge hemorrhaging within the marrow. Before this inauspicious awakening, scrabbling across the hostel bathroom floor, she had been dreaming.
In her dream an immense red hart with crystalline antlers is pursued through a dark forest. The antlers grow as it courses ahead of a cankerous, pestilential boar. The boar is black and striped with inflamed buboes that burst as it stampedes, charging the hart, the woods split with its violent squeals. The hart’s neck snaps under the weight of the profusion of pellucid antlers entangled with grasping branches. The boar copulates with the fallen hart—the hart’s body rent from carnal rutting, births snakes as its eyes are consumed from within by maggots.
She finds the bathroom and enthusiastically falls to her knees, convulsively voiding her empty stomach. Torrents of bile evacuate her shaking body. “When did I last eat,” she frantically s
earches for an answer. Alongside the acidic stream etching away the verdigris of grime, memories plaintively grasp for her attention.
A concrete building in a desolate field. A girl with ruby hair; her black jacket etched with white scribbles of band logos, a blue mink collar frames her face. She blew a kiss and turned away into flashing white lights. Her nape and the back of her war vest bore the same stylized pulpy maggot consuming its tail with swarming tentacles. Tall slender men with cruel sensual smiles. A furious aural assault amidst lights strobing white and red. An anachronistically opulent sports car. Being lost in a press of bodies—youthful faces screaming in the stark contrast of corpse paint. Snorting vermillion lines off of a hazy pink mirror. A black square devouring her field of vision.
She terminates the acidic convulsions and stands up to look at herself in the mirror. Pinned in the corner is a note:
THE FACTORIES OF RESURRECTION ARE IN OPERATION
“How extraordinary life without the past is
Dangerous but without penitence and memories”
69° 24′ 50″ N, 30° 13′ 55″ E
Don’t be late
A card is taped next to the note. On it a nude woman with a dancer's body defiantly holds a scepter aloft astride a roaring lion rampant. She is in the center of a vortex of rainbows and lightning and outside the maelstrom: a hyena, a pig, a sphinx and a cockatrice—rendered in horrifying stark lines, absent color.
Shakily, she inventories the contents of her backpack and leaves the room. She’s near the highway and the turgid rattle of the railway is somewhere nearby. She knows she parked close by but she struggles to recall how she retained this information—or how she arrived here. Soon, the city blurs around her as the engine obediently purrs; the skyline of the city—elegant, geometric starkness encompassing the ideals of a dead empire standing vigil over the transformation of the city, mouldering angels of utopian ideals never realized.
Two Weeks Earlier