by Lucy Taylor
“You don’t really need to see the City,” Majeed said. “I can show you many of its delights right here. Tonight.”
He was rummaging around inside his suitcase. Val watched, the narcotic effect of the opium blunting her perceptions in a way she found increasingly distressing. But being bound was always a pleasure of contradictory excitements: arousal and submission and panic like actors vying for center stage, each taking a turn before relinquishing the spotlight to the next. The trick, she knew from much experience, was similar to life: relax into the game, submit, and the ferocity of pleasure that resulted could be so akin to pain that the two were almost indistinguishable.
“I’ve grown too fond of you for my own good,” Majeed was saying.
He turned around, the effect of the narcotic in Val’s system making his eyes appear more feline than ever, gold-green slits that would have bewitched her gaze entirely had she not been suddenly distracted by the sight of what was in his hands – an eight-inch-long knife that curved up into a sweeping, saberlike blade.
“Don’t worry,” said Majeed. “I’m not going to use this now. I’m only going to let you look at it a while.”
He ran a finger up the blade. In the pale light, it gleamed like something living, like the horn of some exotic beast lacquered with the moonlight spilling through the opening in the shades. Like Majeed’s, its beauty was hypnotic. Val couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“I bought it in the bazaar tonight. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Elegant, well-crafted, and quite cold – the way you’ll soon be. When I saw it, it made me think of you.”
He pressed the blade against Val’s throat, nickingly close, then laid it flat atop her belly, tip pointed toward her eyes. In the warmth of the room, the steel was shockingly cold. She could feel the knobs and ridges of the heavy carved handle making tiny indentations in her flesh.
“One last thing, before I go,” Majeed said. He took a pair of underpants from Val’s suitcase and plugged her mouth, then secured the gag with tape. She made a sound meant to be argumentative – it came out a powerless groan reminiscent of Santos’s inhuman sounds.
“I doubt that you’d cry out, but one can’t take the chance. Especially when I tell you I’m going to kill you. Few believe me when I tell them that at this point, but you might be the exception. I can’t take that chance.”
He bent down and closed Val’s eyelids, kissed them both, then unlocked the door, admitting for an instant only a few words of an argument shouted out in Arabic up the hall, the aroma of couscous and lamb simmering somewhere nearby, then he was gone. She lay there, staring at the knife blade lit up with moon. Her skin tingled at its proximity. Her fingers ached to touch its metal blade.
It was a game, of course, a brutal game meant to seduce with terror. She reassured herself of this so many times it started to sound true, until Majeed’s fundamental harmlessness seemed as inexorable as the law of gravity.
She tried to work the scarves up over the bedposts, though – just in case – but found them snagged beneath some baroque convexity of the post’s design, impossible to slide. Sleep seemed unthinkable, and yet she dozed, dabbling first at the edges of unconsciousness like one wading in the shallows of deep water before plunging, unexpectedly and with mounting fright, into dreams that rushed at her in fragments, like jagged glass. Nightmares flashing past in jigsaw form held to no particular pattern except the terror they inspired.
“Do you like to bleed?”
She thought at first it was another nightmare, this one masking its counterfeit nature behind a facsimile of Majeed’s voice. Then the pain bit into her, and she came awake with a muffled gasp. Majeed stood by the bed, the knife in hand. The cool blade gleamed with blood. She looked down, saw the shallowest of incisions extending in a line between pubic hair and navel. In places, the skin wasn’t even broken. In others, her blood bubbled up like scarlet sweat.
She tried to speak. The gag reduced her words to the gurgling of an imbecile or choking victim. Majeed wiped the blood off on her flank. He caressed the blade across her throat. The lightest of pressures, barely enough to dent the skin.
“I could slash your trachea and you’d never speak again.”
He moved the blade up to one of her bound wrists. “Or open up the veins here and let you bleed to death.”
He traced the blade across Val’s face, lingering on her eyelids, her nose. “Or I could simply remove the parts of your face that make you look human. You’d be surprised how long you could live in that condition. Assuming that you’d want to.”
She made a helpless, rasping sound. Her eyes followed his every twitch, beseeching leniency. If this was a game, the point of pleasure was long past. Her wrists ached. Her heart stuttered with terror, its every beat seeming to squeeze out more drops of blood from the cuts across her belly. Majeed held the knife vertically between her eyes, so close she couldn’t focus on it properly. She saw only Majeed’s pallid face, insectile in its out-of-focusness, bisected by the glimmering slash of silver.
Then a deft flicking of Majeed’s wrist and sudden pain – blood clung in ruby droplets from her left earlobe before dripping off to plunk hotly upon her shoulder. Val thrashed upon the bed, eyes darting from the knifepoint to Majeed’s eyes and back again and back . . .
She couldn’t get Majeed to meet her eyes. That, more than anything he’d yet done, terrified her. He teased her with the knife a while, not cutting her again, but running the blade across her flesh like a divining rod. When Majeed laid down the knife again, he finally met her eyes, but Val’s hopes faltered: There was neither ice nor heat in them, only distance, as though he looked at her from some schizoid universe where pain and love were meaningless in equal measure.
“Since you don’t seem to be enjoying this, I might as well.”
He began withdrawing objects from his pants pockets. Hypodermic syringe and powder: the talismans of addiction. Soon he was busy with the paraphernalia of his habit. He tipped a bit of heroin from bag to spoon, then cooked it with a cigarette lighter held underneath. All this Val watched with stricken eyes, imploring him to end the game but failing to find the least compassion in his vacant gaze. When it came time to tie his arm off and shoot up, Majeed turned his attention back to Val.
“Understand that I don’t want to do this. But if you scream, I’ll cut your vocal cords. So consider very carefully before you yell for help.”
So saying, he reached behind Val’s head and freed her mouth, then used the scarf to tie off a vein.
“Majeed, if this is a game . . .”
“It’s not a game. It’s what I have to do.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I owe somebody.”
“Filakis, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You owe him . . .?”
“A life, taken in a bloody fashion.”
“Why mine?”
“Your curiosity has a self-destructive bent. It led you to search for the City. It also led you to me, the one who’s going to kill you.”
“Why my life, Majeed?”
“Because he enjoys suffering and he knows I . . .” he grimaced, searching for the vein. “Look, just shut up or I’ll find something else to gag you with.”
“Don’t do this. Please. I can’t die yet.”
He tilted a derisive eyebrow and concentrated on drawing the heroin up into the syringe.
“It’s not as though most people expect to choose the moment. Besides, you told me you preferred dangerous . . . people. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Your lifestyle almost demands an untimely end, wouldn’t you agree?”
“But not like this . . . not you.”
“I’m as competent a killer as the next.”
“At least . . . you said you’d take me to the City. Do that at least and then . . .”
“Shut up! You don’t know what you’re asking for. There’s no such place. It’s a lie, a myth, dreamed up by people bored by everything else life has to of
fer, bored out of their minds, quite literally.”
“Don’t make me die like this. Not shackled like the way . . .”
“. . . the way someone once did to you? Who was it, Val? The friendly old physician, the priest? A funny uncle or your crazy mother? What did she do to you?”
“What do you . . .?”
“No, never mind. It’s too late now. Besides I’m tired of listening to you prattle. When I’m not using you for sex, you’re really very tiresome.”
The syringe was full. Majeed squirted out a tiny bit to clear air bubbles. He struck at the vein and missed. His hands trembled so violently the needle appeared to dance.
“Majeed, what did you mean before? About why Filakis wants me to be the one you kill?”
“Shut up. It doesn’t matter. I promised him I would or he won’t let me back into . . .”
“The City? Isn’t that it? So that’s who Filakis really is, the Turk.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Is the place that wonderful? That you’d kill me if Filakis said it was the only way you’d get back in? If that’s the case, why did you ever leave? Why didn’t you just stay there?”
Majeed’s inability to hit a vein was making him increasingly distraught. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his face.
“Is it like the opium?” Val pressed. “You want to stop, you want to leave, but you can’t? It always pulls you back, and you pay any price for readmittance?”
“Shut up!” shouted Majeed and threw the syringe aside.
Val held her breath. The effect of the opium had diminished beneath the more potent effect of terror, and if she was still high, she couldn’t tell it. She felt petrified, frozen in her fear like an insect trapped in amber, her muscles tense as wires, her heart unbeating stone.
If I’m going to die, she thought, let it be something memorable.
Majeed picked up the knife and came over to the bed. He traced the dark line of dried blood that bisected Val’s belly, then lifted the blade tip to her neck. It popped the skin an inch above the hollow at her throat and pooled there before over spilling and streaming down her ribs. The pain was distant, unremarkable, her senses pinpointed entirely on Majeed.
“Why am I the one you have to kill?” she whispered. “Why not someone else?”
“Goddamn you.”
“Why me?”
Majeed raised the knife. His voice was barely audible, the low whistle of insect wings. “Because he knows I love you, damn you.”
He raised the knife and brought it down – twice in quick succession. The blade slashed flesh, but only superficially. The main direction of the thrust was through the scarves that bound Val’s arms.
Majeed waved a dismissive hand. “Go on and live your wretched life. You’ll end up murdered anyway. It just won’t be by me.”
Val breathed again. She rolled off the bed, struggling into items of her clothing with arms that had gone numb as logs, no longer under her command but senseless stobs of flesh. She beat the circulation back into them, had managed to put on a pair of jeans when Majeed suddenly leaped across the bed and stood before her, bloody knife in hand. His eyes were wild, his skin an unnatural, sickly cast, malarial.
“Wait!”
She thought he’d changed his mind about sparing her life.
“Please, Majeed, let’s . . .”
His knife hand began to tremble. Val lunged past him for the door. Majeed grabbed her arm and flung her backward onto the bed.
“I said you can’t . . .”
But Val heard it now, the footsteps approaching up the hall. She had no reason to think they heralded disaster except from Majeed’s reaction, which left little doubt as to his terror. He was darting about the room in a frantic dance of wasted motion, a trapped gerbil, running from window to window in a hopeless effort to find some avenue of escape.
“No,” said Val, when it became clear Majeed meant to jump. “It’s too high. You’ll kill yourself.”
Their room was three floors up. Both windows overlooked a narrow, stone-paved alleyway crowded not only with passersby but with a hodgepodge of vendors, their wares spread out on mats upon the stones. A fall from this height, though possibly not fatal, would shatter bones and organs.
Still, Majeed was forcing one of the windows up and would clearly have taken his chances with the fall had not the door, which Majeed had locked upon his return to the room, suddenly burst inward.
The Turk, in all his corrupt nobility, strode across to the window and locked an arm that was all vein and sinew around Majeed’s throat.
“You betrayed me, bitch,” he crooned in Majeed’s ear. “You promised me her life tonight. You swore.”
Majeed responded by twisting with reptilian grace, the knife still in his hand. Filakis wrenched it from Majeed’s grip and hurled it across the floor. Val heard fingerbones and joints crunch sickeningly. Majeed wailed.
“Don’t,” said Filakis, guessing Val’s intention toward the knife.
He twisted Majeed around, so he could face Val. Behind him the open door tempted with the possibility of escape, but Filakis barred the way. He stared at Val – an odd and terrifying sizing up of her that seemed rife with disgust, abhorrence.
Meanwhile, Majeed struggled in his captor’s arms, choking and sputtering as Filakis applied more pressure to his neck. There was something odd about Filakis’s palms, Val noted. At first, she’d had the impression that they were smeared with blood. Then, she realized the man’s flesh was hennaed with jinn-spells and incantations, a practice designed to ward off evil spirits that she’d observed among the Berber women.
But Val had little time to reflect upon the oddity of the Turk’s indulgence in this superstition. The knife he’d wrested from Majeed lay within easy reach, a temptation that, in the present circumstances, was irresistible. Val grabbed it, thinking to plant the blade in Filakis’s bony neck and would have done so, had she not been halted by a crackling sound and the unfolding of a spectacle before her that rendered her immobile.
Tongues of pale green fire were licking at Filakis and Majeed. Mere tatters, at first, the flames soon grew, tonguing and plucking at Majeed’s face and breasts, at his captor’s opulence of hair. Majeed writhed and screamed in Filakis’s grasp, but the Turk uttered not one cry as the fire climbed his torso, igniting flesh and clothing in its luminous embrace.
Majeed stretched out a hand to Val.
She reached to take it, but fire blossomed from her lover’s fingertips like thorns. There was a moment’s indecision, when Val might have grabbed Majeed’s hand anyway, but the flames were devouring with such speed that, in the instant that she hesitated, Majeed’s hand was burned away, the fingers curling back upon themselves like desiccated fetuses.
Electric, crackling tendrils spread across Majeed’s and Filakis’s faces. Skin cracked and peeled. What lay below, shimmering suet and tendon and bone, was soon unveiled and melted down. All cries stopped and, presently, all motion.
The flame bulged out at its height and formed a funnel, which whirled like some inhuman dervish about the floor, consuming what remained. For several seconds, it danced and capered on the carpet with terrible exuberance, then lost volume and momentum and sputtered out into a tiny heap of rubble and cold ash upon the floor.
Left behind, for an instant only, there glowed an afterimage: steepled towers and squat, dun-colored houses, shimmering like bleak mirages behind medieval walls. The walls, when Val peered closer, appeared to be composed of writhing human bodies, living, faceless, and crudely formed, all locked in carnal congress.
Val blinked – the scene did not disperse, but took on form, dimension. There was a moment when, remembering it later, she was sure she could have simply walked inside the rent in space that appeared open to her. But by the time she gathered wits and courage, the image turned translucent, its third dimension sloughing off like worn-out skin, the remaining threads of form and color liquefying into a few drops of dewlike mist that hovere
d in the air, then dispersed to nothing.
Even as the shock of seeing Majeed’s fate rooted her in place, a small burst of celebration fired her heart. The place she’d glimpsed could be nowhere except the City. That, or Hell, and she meant to find out, one way or another.
Majeed and his mysterious abductor had left behind a small pile of remnants on the floor. She went over to inspect it. Swatches of cloth and leather, scorched and frayed as though they’d been through an incinerator, Majeed’s opium pipe, or what was left of it, reduced to a lump of ivory and melted gold, dollops of glass, coin-sized, that must have once been a hypodermic syringe.
And something else: a pale green piece of stone, slightly smaller than a hen’s egg, rounded at the top but with a flat base. Val picked it up and turned it over in her hand. The object was similar to a number of the incense burners Majeed had set out on the windowsill – in the case of the latter, the top could be unscrewed and removed to reveal the candle contained inside.
Unlike the incense burners, however, this jar offered no seam to indicate where the top could be twisted off. It seemed to be a solid piece of stone, onyx or malachite perhaps. If so, its function was entirely ornamental, yet so closely did it resemble the others that Val couldn’t help but think a seam existed somewhere in its intricately carved sides, but was simply far more subtly crafted and inconspicuously designed.
She turned the small jar in her hands a dozen times, yet found nothing to indicate it opened into halves. Its varnished surface was carved with some kind of complex floral pattern. Leafy spirals and overlapping whorls interlocked in patterns that at first appeared both random and simple, but, upon closer inspection, proved to be teasingly complex, provocative in their design. Stamenlike shafts writhed and twisted into budded knots upon the top while along the sides, carved blossoms formed fantastic arabesques that defeated each attempt Val made to trace them to their source in the design.
At length she put the object down, but not before it had revealed at least one secret. At the warmth of her hands, it began to emit the faintest of odors, a musk so subtle in its fragrance that Val could sense it only with her nose pressed to the stone.