“Oliver,” she said.
“Jacqueline.” I pressed the word to the wood with a kiss.
Her body was seething, her shaved sex opening and closing like some exquisite plant, purple and lilac and rose.
“Let me in,” I said to Koos.
“You will not survive one night with her.”
“Let me in.”
“She is expensive,” he warned. “How much do you want?”
“Everything you have. The shirt off your back, your money, your jewelry; then she is yours.”
I wanted to beat the door down, or break his nicotine-stained fingers one by one until he gave me the key. He knew what I was thinking. “The key is hidden,” he said, “and the door is strong. You must pay, Mr. Vassi. You want to pay.” It was true. I wanted to pay.
“You want to give me all you have ever owned, all you have ever been. You want to go to her with nothing to claim you back. I know this. It’s how they all go to her.”
“All? Are there many?”
“She is insatiable,” he said, without relish. It wasn’t a pimp’s boast: it was his pain, I saw that clearly. “I am always finding more for her, and burying them.”
Burying them.
That, I suppose, is Koos’s function; he disposes of the dead. And he will get his lacquered hands on me after tonight; he will fetch me off her when I am dry and useless to her, and find some pit, some canal, some furnace to lose me in. The thought isn’t particularly attractive.
Yet here I am with all the money I could raise from selling my few remaining possessions on the table in front of me, my dignity gone, my life hanging on a thread, waiting for a pimp and a key.
It’s well dark now, and he’s late. But I think he is obliged to come. Not for the money; he probably has few requirements beyond his heroin and his mascara. He will come to do business with me because she demands it and he is in thrall to her, every bit as much as I am. Oh, he will come. Of course he will come.
Well, I think that is sufficient.
This is my testimony. I have no time to reread it now. His footsteps are on the stairs (he limps) and I must go with him. This I leave to whoever finds it, to use as they think fit. By morning I shall be dead, and happy. Believe it.
***
My God, she thought, Koos has cheated me.
Vassi had been outside the door, she’d felt his flesh with her mind and she’d embraced it. But Koos hadn’t let him in, despite her explicit orders. Of all men, Vassi was to be allowed free access, Koos knew that. But he’d cheated her, the way they’d all cheated her except Vassi. With him (perhaps) it had been love.
She lay on the bed through the night, never sleeping. She seldom slept now for more than a few minutes: and only then with Koos watching her. She’d done herself harm in her sleep, mutilating herself without knowing it, waking up bleeding and screaming with every limb sprouting needles she’d made out of her own skin and muscle, like a flesh cactus.
It was dark again, she guessed, but it was difficult to be sure. In this heavily curtained, bare-bulb-lit room, it was a perpetual day to the senses, perpetual night to the soul. She would lie, bed-sores on her back, on her buttocks, listening to the far sounds of the street, sometimes dozing for a while, sometimes eating from Koos’s hand, being washed, being toileted, being used.
A key turned in the lock. She strained from the mattress to see who it was. The door was opening . . . opening . . . opened.
Vassi. Oh God, it was Vassi at last, she could see him crossing the room toward her.
Let this not be another memory, she prayed, please let it be him this time: true and real.
“Jacqueline.”
He said the name of her flesh, the whole name. “Jacqueline.” It was him.
Behind him, Koos stared between her legs, fascinated by the dance of her labia.
“Koo . . . ” she said, trying to smile.
“I brought him.” He grinned at her, not looking away from her sex.
“A day,” she whispered. “I waited a day, Koos. You made me wait—”
“What’s a day to you?” he said, still grinning.
She didn’t need the pimp any longer, not that he knew that. In his innocence he thought Vassi was just another man she’d seduced along the way; to be drained and discarded like the others. Koos believed he would be needed tomorrow; that’s why he played this fatal game so artlessly.
“Lock the door,” she suggested to him. “Stay if you like.”
“Stay?” he said, leering. “You mean, and watch?”
He watched anyway. She knew he watched through that hole he had bored in the door; she could hear him pant sometimes. But this time, let him stay forever.
Carefully, he took the key from the outside of the door, closed it, slipped the key into the inside and locked it. Even as the lock clicked she killed him, before he could even turn round and look at her again. Nothing spectacular in the execution; she just reached into his pigeon chest and crushed his lungs. He slumped against the door and slid down, smearing his face across the wood.
Vassi didn’t even turn round to see him die; she was all he ever wanted to look at again.
He approached the mattress, crouched, and began to untie her ankles. The skin was chafed, the rope scabby with old blood. He worked at the knots systematically, finding a calm he thought he’d lost, a simple contentment in being here at the end, unable to go back, and knowing that the path ahead was deep in her.
When her ankles were free, he began on her wrists, interrupting her view of the ceiling as he bent over her. His voice was soft.
“Why did you let him do this to you?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“To move; even to live. Every day, agony.”
“Yes.”
He understood so well that total incapacity to exist.
She felt him at her side, undressing, then laying a kiss on the sallow skin of the stomach of the body she occupied. It was marked with her workings; the skin had been stretched beyond its tolerance and was permanently crisscrossed.
He lay down beside her, and the feel of his body against hers was not unpleasant.
She touched his head. Her joints were stiff, the movements painful, but she wanted to draw his face up to hers. He came, smiling, into her sight, and they exchanged kisses.
My God, she thought, we are together.
And thinking they were together, her will was made flesh. Under his lips her features dissolved, becoming the red sea he’d dreamed of, and washing up over his face, that was itself dissolving: common waters made of thought and bone.
Her keen breasts pricked him like arrows; his erection, sharpened by her thought, killed her in return with his only thrust. Tangled in a wash of love they thought themselves extinguished, and were.
Outside, the hard world mourned on, the chatter of buyers and sellers continuing through the night. Eventually indifference and fatigue claimed even the eagerest merchant. Inside and out there was a healing silence: an end to losses and to gains.
AN EXHIBITION OF MOTHER AND MONSTER
Stephanie M. Wytovich
Inside the teratology room sleeps the fate of monsters, a resting place for the deformities whose faces line these walls the rejects of Mother Nature, her prodigious anomalies spat out and left to die.
These oddities, stagnant in century-old formaldehyde, relax in public tombs available for viewing at $18.00 a day, a wholesome fee for the Devil’s smile, this collection of curiosities: beware the wickedness of spiral beggars, look upon the whispers that went against God’s plan, these mutilated baby boys, these fractured femme fatales, opened and stretched, split-lipped and broken, we showcase their corpses in air-tight jars their mouths, yawning graveyards of abandonment, their eyes, a reflection of consent forms and sins.
Stand before them, read their stories, their dissected diaries of splintered bone, of engorged muscles,
webbed and bulbous, they wrote with lobster claws, breathed
with gills, their heart-beats preserved in an exhibition to the evils who bore them: of mother and monster, of doctor and demon, these be the rotted seeds, the archetypes of luciferous defect conserved as warnings to the loose, to the imaginative and wicked, the small-womb’d and the back-wood witch.
Come close, now, listen to them breathe: them, the disfigured vibrations, the warped frequencies of our fetishes and kinks, these fallen seraphs, these nightmare machines. Look, but don’t touch, memorize and never forget, the half-baked children, the angel-food warriors their clocks may have broken, but their spirits still tick so take your pictures, claim your keepsakes, remember this history of beatific pain,
Bless yourselves before you leave, and may God have mercy on your curious, curious souls.
CURIOSITIES
MADAME PAINTE: FOR SALE
John Langan
“This?” the man behind the counter says. “Why, this is Madame Painte.”
The figure is short, a foot and a half tall, and squat, about the same dimensions across, composed of what might be porcelain. The face is round, the eyes squeezed shut by the wide smile lifting the cheeks. A pointed hat fails to conceal the pointed tips of the figure’s ears. It wears a long apron dress over a peasant blouse. A typical garden gnome, you think, except for the colors, from which it obviously derives its name. It’s been painted without regard for the margins of clothing and skin. Black, green, and orange slash down the figure from right to left. The face is mostly dark green, the hat orange mixed with black. A splash of white paint traverses the closed eyes; the effect is less a mask and more a piece of webbing. You saw the figure sitting to the left of the door to the antiques shop as you walked up the path to it and were so struck by its remarkable grotesquerie that you lifted and carried it inside, setting it on the front counter. On the way, you read the notecard strung to the top of the hat: MUST BE KEPT OUTSIDE.
“I didn’t mean its name,” you start.
“Of course not,” the man says. He’s on the small side, more wiry than slender. Based on the ratio of salt to pepper in his mustache and hair, he’s somewhere in the deep middle of middle age. He says, “You meant the warning.”
“Must be kept outside,” you read. “Why must?”
“The official reason is, she’s covered in lead paint.”
You step back from the counter, wipe your hands on your jeans. “There’s an unofficial reason?”
“There’s a story,” the man says. “Would you like to hear it? It’s brief.”
“Um. Sure,” you say, but do not move any closer.
“Madame Painte,” the man says, “hails from Holland by way of Guam by way of Australia. She was part of a line of garden ornaments manufactured by a factory outside of Amsterdam in the 1980s. I’m not sure how she traveled to the western Pacific, possibly via cargo ship. I know she was decorating the front lawn of a house in Yigo by 1995. This was the residence of a colonel stationed at the U.S. Air Force base there. She was already sporting her distinctive paint job, though I’m unclear who gave it to her. It may have been the colonel’s wife, whose name was Priscilla. As I understand it, she was an artist—bit of an amateur anthropologist, too. She’s the first person I’m aware of who insisted the figure be kept outside. This was when she sold it to a young Australian couple, Trudi and Lenard Niles, visiting the island. The Colonel had been transferred back stateside, and he and his wife had decided to take the opportunity to thin their possessions. The Nileses—well, mostly Trudi—were quite infatuated with the Madame. Priscilla was reluctant to part with her, said she couldn’t let her go with just anyone. The Nileses thought she was trying to up the price, but that wasn’t it. She’d give the figure away for free to the exactly right person. I guess the young couple wasn’t quite perfect, because she took their money, but they were good enough for her to part with Madame Painte. Only after they’d sworn to keep her outside their home, though.
“This was how the figure made her way from Guam to Canberra.”
“Let me guess,” you say, “the couple brought her inside their house.”
“Not at first, no,” the man says, “but eventually, yes. Initially, they placed her in their back garden, next to a tall Claret Ash. The Nileses had a small metal table and pair of chairs near that spot. When the weather was warm, they would bring their morning coffee there. Trudi was a writer, a travel writer; Lenard was high up in an electronics company. After he went off to the office, she would carry her notebook, and later her laptop, to the table and work on whatever article was due that month. Actually, she wrote an article about the trip to Guam, which is how I know as much as I do about Priscilla and the promise she extracted.”
“What changed?” you say. “I mean, what made the couple break their promise?”
The man shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not certain anything did change, which is to say, I’m not sure there was a moment when one of them looked at the other and said, ‘The time has come for us to forsake our vow.’ I suspect their promise wasn’t that much to begin with, just words said to get what they wanted. Then one day, years later, they decided to redecorate, and thought their garden ornament would look better in a corner of the living room. If they recalled their conversation with the colonel’s wife, their pledge to her, it was in a bemused, hey-do-you-remember way. They cleaned the dirt and insects off Madame Painte, and brought her inside.”
“And?”
“At first, nothing. As I said, they were redecorating, painting walls, replacing furniture, putting in a new kitchen. For a time, the interior of their house was fairly chaotic. Madame Painte sat in her corner and waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“The right moment. Months had passed. Everything had calmed; the house was in its new configuration. One night, Lenard woke up to use the toilet. On his way back to bed, he saw something on the wall outside the room. It was a splash of white, as if someone had swiped a paintbrush across that spot, or as if moonlight were reflecting off a mirrored surface in the living room. He waved his hand in front of it, which had no effect. He placed his palm against it, but could feel no difference in texture. To the best of my knowledge, he did not notice a resemblance between the white streak on the wall and the white mask Madame Painte wore.
“Next morning, after her coffee and writing, Trudi saw that a patch of the wall beside the bedroom door was discolored, faded the way paint gets after years of direct sunlight. She touched the spot, and it crumbled under her fingertips. She found it strange, especially since the surface had been painted so recently, but she decided it must be some form of dry rot. When she discussed it with Lenard over dinner, he mentioned his late-night vision, but neither drew any conclusions from it. They made plans to call a contractor.
“A couple of days later, Trudi saw the white streak. Once again, it was late at night, the house dark. She had stayed up finishing an article whose deadline she had let draw too near. Walking into the bedroom, she glimpsed something white draped over the hindquarters of Toro, the Niles’s cat, who was asleep at the foot of the bed. So tired was she that she took the white streak for moonlight shining through the venetian blinds; only later would she realize it had been a new moon that night.
“In the morning, Toro was gone from the bed, which was not unusual, and he didn’t come for his breakfast, which was. Trudi found him in the garden, when she brought her coffee out there (Lenard had left for an early meeting). The minute she sat, she heard a low moan from somewhere nearby. She recognized it as the cat, but it was a sound he’d never made before, halfway between a complaint and a warning. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She stood, called the cat’s name. He uttered that weird groan again. She looked around the garden. He wasn’t hard to find: what remained of him lay under a bush—some variety of hakea, I think it was.”
“What do you mean, ‘what remained’?”
“From a little below his midsection, the cat had shriveled, the fur gone, the skin blackened and shrunken against the bone. It was wh
at you might have expected to find had the cat been dead for years. He was panting, obviously in pain, unable to understand what had happened to him. Trudi’s first impulse was to take him to the veterinarian, but Toro wouldn’t let her near him, hissing and clawing at her as she reached for him. She had to settle for calling the vet, who promised to stop by after her office was closed. By then, it was too late. Toro had bared his fangs at some unseen foe, and breathed his last. The vet was puzzled, to say the least. This degree of atrophy suggested some type of venom, but the speed with which it had acted was, in her experience, unprecedented. She asked to take Toro’s remains to her office for an autopsy, which Trudi consented to. As the vet lifted him, though, the cat . . . came apart. His lower portion crumbled and his insides slid out onto the ground. The vet removed what she could, but it was a messy business.”
“Did she find anything?” you say.
“Not exactly,” the man says. “She phoned Trudi a day or two later. From what she’d been able to see under the microscope, the cat’s cells had collapsed, lost their integrity and dissolved into one another. It’s the kind of effect certain kinds of spider venom have on their victim’s tissues. There was more. The worst affected portions of Toro were completely dry, every last drop of moisture drained from them. Of course, Trudi wanted to know what spider or other creature had done this to her cat. The vet didn’t know. It was a familiar joke that Australia was full to the brim with deadly wildlife, but nothing she was acquainted with operated in this fashion on mammals of any size. Possibly, they were dealing with an invasive species. She was going to make some calls, ask if anything new had snuck into people’s back gardens. In the meantime, Trudi should be careful, and should tell her husband to be careful, as well.
“During the following day, there was a moment Trudi looked at Madame Painte, at the white swath across the figure’s smiling face, and was struck by the resemblance between the decoration and the white stripe she had seen on Toro. Hadn’t Lenard mentioned a white mark on the wall outside their bedroom? She remembered the promise she’d made to Priscilla. For an instant, the details threatened to cohere into a bizarre and awful whole. As quickly as the thought occurred to her, however, she rejected it. It was ridiculous, absurd, like something from an old horror story. Over dinner that night, she shared the idea with Lenard. He nodded at the coincidence, but dismissed it, as well.
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