I hadn’t been aware of finishing my first one. I tipped the Dixie bottle to the light: empty. The vodka tonic was gone too.
“No thanks,” I said. I wanted one, but I wasn’t sure what was going on here, and I knew I would be drunker in ten minutes than I was now.
“Well, I would. Excuse me a minute, will you, Andrew?” He actually waited for my nod of assent before walking away. I watched him wind through the crowd, sinuous as a Siamese cat, and I wondered what such an elegant, tightly wound, oddly polite man wanted with me. The bar was well jammed by this time, and I soon lost sight of him.
Ten minutes later he hadn’t come back. I shifted in my chair, wondering if he’d given me the slip, desperately needing a piss. My bladder had shrunk in prison, where aiming one’s cock into the chamber pot and producing a few tainted drops of urine qualified as a way to relieve the boredom. I worried that Jay would return first and think I had gone. By that point I was already deeply intrigued with him, though I couldn’t quite say why.
But nature won out. When I finally got up from the table, able to hang on no longer, I had to clutch at the back of my chair to keep from stumbling sideways. The bar tilted at a vicious angle. Get ahold of yourself, I thought. You’re an alcoholic and an Englishman. You can sail through this.
It was more like lurching into a tempest, but I managed to negotiate my way across the bar and into the men’s loo. Mercifully, it was a single tiny room whose door locked from the inside. After Sam, I wasn’t quite ready for another dingy row of sinks, another dim line of cubicles. I pissed what felt like several litres, then glanced at myself in the mirror as I was leaving. Hair spiky and tousled, spectacles askew, eyes faintly mad: just a nice English tourist out on a bender.
Jay was leaning against the wall outside the door. He looked as cockeyed as I felt. “I needed to pee,” he told me, “but I had three shots of tequila on the way to the bathroom.”
“Why three?”
“Once for every time you’ve unnerved me.” He gave me a sly sidelong look. “First—when I laid eyes on you. Second—when you shook my hand. And third—when I looked back at our table and saw you were gone.”
I tried to grasp his shoulder. My hand seemed to float between us for a moment, then wound up on his chest, in the V of his shirt where cloth gave way to flesh. Jay reached out long arms and pulled me in. I stumbled, fell against him. He was a bit taller, and I felt my face crush into his neck, my lips splay open against his throat. Then somehow we were kissing as ravenously as I had ever kissed anyone, alive or dead.
My fingers were tangled in his hair, tugging so hard it had to hurt. His tongue was in my mouth, raking against the sharp edges of my teeth, feeling as if it would plunge straight down my throat and choke me. He tasted of blood and rage. His kiss was laced with the slow savour of pain. I knew these tastes; they were the tastes in my own mouth, the flavour of my life.
I did not know what Jay was, not yet; but on some instinctual, almost biological level I recognized him. I knew then that this man was infinitely dangerous to me. I also knew that I had to go as deep inside him as he would let me.
When I was able to stop grinding my body against his as if I meant to drive him through the wall, I pulled back and looked him in the face. Trying to read his eyes was like searching for sentience in a pool of murky water: I thought I saw things moving deep down in there, but all I could be sure of was my own faint reflection. “What are we letting ourselves in for?” I whispered.
“An adventure,” Jay said, and offered up another of those lovely cold smiles. He told me later that, at that moment, he still believed he would kill me.
There was no question but that we were leaving together. When we quit the Hand of Glory, I didn’t know whether to bless the place or curse it. We walked up a side street, stealing glances at each other, occasionally bumping shoulders or brushing hands. The streets were narrow and quiet, the cobbled pavements overhung with lacy iron balconies and Victorian cottages and a curious flat-fronted, shuttered type of house. There were mysterious gates and dark alleyways, through which one occasionally glimpsed a sylvan courtyard with a fountain sparkling at its centre.
Jay pointed at a tall gray building on a corner. “That house is haunted.”
“By what?”
“The ghosts of tortured slaves.”
An expectant silence lay heavily between us, not as if he wanted me to inquire further about the ghost story, but more as if he thought I might have some opinion on tortured slaves.
“Fascinating,” I said, leaving it ambiguous for now.
Again I wondered what this man wanted from me, and what I expected to get from him. Were we going to fuck? It had been so long since I’d had sex with a breathing body, I wasn’t sure I would remember how. Did I think I was going to kill him, on his own territory, with no weapon or means of disposal? The idea appealed to me, but the reality seemed implausible, and more so when I studied Jay’s profile. This was no acquiescent brat to the slaughter. This was some other kind of animal.
Jay stopped and unlocked an iron gate with finals wrought in the shape of pineapples. We passed through an overgrown courtyard to a small white house. A series of keys, a sequence of numbers pressed on an electronic keypad, and we were inside. My memory telescoped briefly back to my Brixton flat, the last place I’d lived before being arrested, and the complicated series of locks and bolts I’d had on the door.
My terror had been of someone coming in while I was away and finding something I’d forgotten to dispose of. This was not a terror of arrest or punishment; the fantasy ended abruptly with the nameless intruder’s find. It was a terror of exposure, of having the lid ripped off my secret world, its vulnerable inner workings laid bare. This was how I actually did feel when they came for me: a blind, shrivelling, sorrowful pain, the sort of pain a garden snail must feel when stepped on and cracked open, its spiralling home crushed to shards, now nothing more than a snotty smear of meat left to dry in harsh sunlight.
Jay led me deeper into the house. The parlour was a marvel of brocade and gilding. I liked the way it smelled, an overlay of sweet incense with a scrim of dust around the edges, a hint of mildew in the cracks.
We entered the kitchen. The floor and all the cupboard tops were immaculate. Against one wall was a small table made of tubular metal and some glossy white substance with gold flecks embedded in it. The table held a salt cellar, a pepper mill, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, and a wine corkscrew. There were two matching chairs, of which I took one.
“Would you like a drink?” Jay asked.
“Er … not just now.” The room was still tilting a bit, and I wanted to stay alert for whatever might happen next.
He poured a draught of cognac from an expensive-looking bottle, drank off half of it at once, and came over to me cradling the snifter, a great bubble of thin fragile crystal. The cognac in the bottom was the colour of liquid copper. Jay wafted it under my nose. “Just a taste?”
“Why not?” I took the snifter from him, sipped, and held cognac in my mouth before I swallowed. Its smooth smoky burn blessed my tongue.
“Lovely,” I said, looking up into his strange eyes.
“Yes, isn’t it?” With one hand on the back of my chair, he leaned over and kissed me. The flavour of the cognac passed between our mouths, warmed and enriched with our saliva. One of Jay’s hands grasped mine and I felt something cold slide round my right wrist, a circle of metal that tightened and clicked shut.
I broke the kiss and stared down. Jay had handcuffed me to the chair. Part of what I felt was stark disbelief at being trapped again. Part was utter unsurprise that Jay had done it.
I looked back up at him and smiled.
The slightest shadow of doubt flickered across his face and was gone. He took another sip of cognac, wet his fingers on his tongue, and ran them slowly along my jawbone. He stopped at the juncture where my pulse beat and let his hand rest on my throat.
“So it’s a bit of a game you like, Jay?” I ask
ed him. “Well, that’s all right, then. I like a game too.”
I laid my free hand on his, stroked the length of his arm, twined my fingers in his hair and pulled his head down to mine. His lips went stiff when I kissed them. His tongue lay in his mouth as if stunned. I was very aware of his teeth, of their hardness and sharp shiny edges. I let go of his hair, kissed the underside of his chin, moved my mouth down to the smooth dip of his collarbone.
“Play with me,” I whispered into his skin. “I’m all yours.”
My left hand found the corkscrew on the table. I grasped it clumsily and felt the sharp tip bite into my flesh. Jay’s body was rigid everywhere it met mine. I swung my legs up and pinned his arms to his sides as best I could. He wasn’t very well trapped, but he was too startled to break away at once. The chair tipped backward and hit the table. I pressed the screw’s tip against the pulse of his throat, just where his cognac-damp fingers had touched me.
“Come on then,” I hissed into his ear. “Let’s play your game. What’s your next move?”
He tried to jerk his right arm out of my knee hold, and I jabbed the corkscrew harder against his throat. A thin red dot appeared at the point where it dimpled his skin, quickening my blood and my breath. The sight of scarlet on stainless steel has always done this to me.
Jay went very still. “What do you want?”
What did I want? I beg you to recall that the man had a sharp object at his throat; my love did not make a habit of stupid questions. “What the bloody hell do you think I want? Take back your jewelry—it doesn’t suit me at all!”
“Jewelry?”
I moaned in frustration and rattled the handcuff against the chair’s metal frame.
“Oh, those.” My legs still pinned his arms to his sides; my blade still lay against his jugular; but I swear I could feel the man considering. “Well, I bet I could get across the room and out of your reach before you could inflict a fatal cut. What would you do then?”
“I’d drag the chair after me and finish you off in a corner.”
“What if I told you I had a gun in that drawer over there?” He gestured with his chin. I followed his motion with the corkscrew, which was beginning to seem a slightly ridiculous weapon. My legs were tiring from the awkward position, and I felt drunker than ever.
“I’d say you were lying, Jay. You’re not a gun man.”
“You’d bet your life on that?”
“I’ve bet it on less.”
We stared at each other, both sizzling with adrenaline, blazing with lust, terrified to move. I realized he was enjoying this as perversely as I was.
“Fine,” said Jay at last, “let me go. I’ll get you the key.”
I unscissored him and slowly took the screw from his throat. I had no choice; I could not remain in that precarious tipped-back position a moment longer. The chair’s front legs hit the floor, and I realized that my thigh muscles were trembling.
Jay backed slowly across the kitchen, not toward the drawer he’d indicated, but to the refrigerator. He stood beside the gleaming appliance for a moment, transfixed me with a clear calm gaze. I noticed, as one will mark small details in such moments, that his refrigerator door was unadorned by decorative magnets, sticky notes, snapshots, and other such frippery. Like most of the surfaces in the kitchen, it appeared to have been recently wiped down with a strong disinfectant.
Jay opened the freezer and took out a parcel done up in heavy black plastic. He brought it to the table and began to unwrap it, no longer pretending to worry about the corkscrew I still held in my free hand. He knew he’d caught my interest again.
By the time he had the parcel undone, I had already guessed its contents. I had stored and disposed of many such parcels myself. I knew the shape and heft of a wrapped human head, the distinctive size, the rough egg-shaped bundle it made inside plastic, cloth, or newspaper.
Faces lose much of their personality when frozen. The features harden and take on a shrivelled look. Sometimes it becomes difficult to tell one from another upon unwrapping them. This one had stringy dark hair and cloudy gray marbles for eyes. The nose and left cheek had flattened somehow, perhaps against the bottom of the freezer. The mouth was slightly open, the edges of upper and lower teeth a scant inch apart. Inside was only darkness.
Jay took a small key from his pocket, showed it to me, then dropped it into that frigid black mouth. I only just kept myself from scoffing. So this was his big test, was it?
I took hold of the frost-rimed hair and pulled the head across the table to me. I slid my thumb and forefinger into the narrow gap between the teeth and felt for the key. My nails scraped unpleasantly along the rough surface of the tongue. It was like clawing at a stale brick of ice cream. Something adhered to my fingers: saliva, blood, crystallized epithelial cells. I disliked the sensation of the cold teeth scraping my knuckles. I’d handled plenty of fresh remains, and some not so fresh, but I had avoided this sort of storage whenever possible. I liked the cooling pallor of room-temperature death, not the icy shock of the deep freeze. Still, a show of distaste at this point would be unwise.
The key had slipped to the very back of the tongue. As I scrabbled for it, I felt it disappear into the passage of the throat. I was rapidly becoming annoyed with the whole business. I felt almost certain I could kill Jay even with one wrist cuffed, so why bother proving anything? But I didn’t want to kill Jay.
I picked up the head by its hair and gave it a firm shake, then rapped the stump of the neck against the tabletop. A head liberated from its body is heavier than you might expect, but if you have plenty of hair to grip by, it is easily lifted with one hand. The key fell from the ragged end of the oesophagus. I set the head down with a thump, pinched the key off the tabletop with two fingers (the same two I’d put in that frozen mouth), and unlocked the wretched handcuffs.
As I stood and faced him, the expression on Jay’s face was something like wonder. “What are you?” he asked.
I touched my fingers to the bead of scarlet on his throat, brought them to my lips and tasted his blood for the first time. “I’m your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you’ve become one?”
Mutely, he shook his head no.
“Never relinquish your terrors,” I told him. “That’s when they catch you. What is your greatest terror, Jay?”
There was no hesitation. His voice sounded hollow, flat. “Loneliness.”
“Do you think you’re lonely now?”
Another nod.
“Imagine, then, a cell with four walls. The ceiling is a map of a terrible country you know by heart. The walls can move and close in on you if you stare at them long enough. There’s no blood, no company, nothing but the rasp of your breathing and the stink of your chamber pot.” My voice was beginning to shake. “No one comes in, and it seems you never go out, and you’ve nothing at all to look at, but anyone can look at you. Does it terrify you?”
“Yes.”
“Then never give up that terror. Never grow careless of it. They could kill you, Jay; they kill murderers here, don’t they? Perhaps that’s kindest. Yes, surely it is. What a merciful country. If they catch me again, Jay, make them kill me before they put me back in the coffin!”
“Andrew.” Jay’s hands were on my shoulders, his thumbs stroking the sides of my throat. The touch soothed me somehow. “I don’t know what your story is, but you’re not in prison now. Nobody’s going to kill you. Stay with me.” His eyes shone. “Play with me.”
“Yes.” I slid my arms around his narrow waist, leaned into him. “I think I can do that.”
We stood embracing in the stark light of the kitchen. When we kissed, it was not the sloppy tongue-sparring we’d done at the club; this was more tentative, almost delicate, a rediscovery of each other. Soon, though, Jay broke the kiss and pulled me toward the door. “Come out back. I want to show you my slave quarters.”
I had never savoured decay. Handled it, yes; conquered it, yes. But never had I revelled in it.<
br />
Never, until now.
As Jay stood by smiling, I savaged the headless body he laid out for me. I gripped its rigid shoulders as I fucked it. I slashed its bloodless flesh with knives, scissors, screwdrivers, everything Jay put into my hand. When I had reduced it to little more than a smear on the ancient bricks, I wallowed in its scraps.
Then Jay joined me, and licked me clean.
I felt a vestigial trace of disgust as his tongue combed shreds of tissue from the hair on my lower belly. But it was nothing I could sustain, not as the world expects a sane man to do. Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely. How many of you have lingered over a rendering of my exploits or similar ones, lovingly detailed in its dismemberments, thinly veiled with moral indignation? How many of you have risked a glance at some wretched soul bleeding his life out on a highway shoulder? How many have slowed down for a better look?
It is claimed that habitual murderers must harbour some veiled trauma in their past: some pathetic concatenation of abuse, rape, soul-corrosion. As far as I can remember, this did not hold true for me. No one interfered with me, no one beat me, and the only corpse I saw during childhood was the thoroughly uninteresting one of my grand-auntie. I emerged from the womb with no morals, and no one has been able to instill any in me since. My incarceration was a long dream, a limbo to be endured—not a punishment, for I had done nothing wrong. I had spent my life feeling like a species of one. Monster, mutation, Nietzschean superman—I could perceive no difference. I had no basis for comparison. Now here was another of my kind, and I wanted to know everything about him.
But he was rummaging in a cabinet, pulling out a bottle of vodka, guzzling from it and forcing it on me. The glass and the label were smeared with bloody fingerprints. The neck chattered between my teeth as I drank. I had not feared Jay when he wanted to kill me. Now that he wanted me alive, the intimacy between us was terrifying.
We drank until we collapsed in the boy’s shredded ruins. When morning light woke us, we rose aching and stinking, staggered into the house, and leaned on each other in the warm spray of the shower. Clean as babes, we burrowed into bed and slept for the rest of the day, half unnerved and half comforted by the nearness of each other’s breathing body.
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