Suspended above them, Beryl hovers somewhere between the thresholds of ecstasy and shock, feeling almost as weightless as though her body were buoyed up by water. Her breath has become strenuous and uneven,and she is sweating now despite the chill air. Her long hair, an indifferent and unremarkable shade of blonde, dangles lank about her face and shoulders, and she keeps her eyes shut, because it seems impolite to watch them, when they have accorded her such an honour. Even when she finally feels their strange seeking hands upon her, even then, out of respect, she does not open her eyes.
They might yet reject me, she thinks, though the thought is dimmed and made indistinct by the swelling, throbbing pain and by exhaustion and the bright sizzle of the adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her bloodstream and brain. They may still see fit to pull me down and turn me out to either find my way back or die alone in the darkness. She cannot know that this isn’t true, that though they are patient creatures accustomed to interminable waits, they have never once rejected a soul who has successfully navigated the labyrinth and so found the long, winding path down to them.
Wilmarth’s beach-found treasure has been taken from its place of pride, and the one among them who found it, but who is no longer Wilmarth, removes the oddly mercurial object from its filthy shroud and holds it up for all of them to see. The instrument glints dully in the feeble yellow-green light suffusing this cavity in the world’s bowels, and they all turn to see, momentarily distracted from Beryl and her gifts. This is as close as ever they come to awe or reverence, these rare glimpses of the thing that is neither a scalpel nor a buttonhook, that is neither bronze nor blue Egyptian glass. From their withered vocal cords come the most gentle utterances left to them, sounds which to Beryl’s ears seem hardly more than the final, strangling gasps of drowning men and women. But she knows, too, that it is not for her to judge the beauty or fearsomeness of these voices, and she is merely grateful to the dark gods of her secret pantheon that she has lived long enough to hear them at all.
The same one among these creatures who first touched the object holds it high above his head, left arm extended far as his atrophied reach will allow, and immediately all the others slither or hop or scuttle to one side or the other, clearing a path to Beryl’s suspended body. One by one by one, the crowd grows silent, ceasing their guttural exaltations, and she knows that at last her terrible journey is almost done. In her dreams, she has seen this moment half a hundred times, and Beryl does not need to open her eyes to know the gleeful, voracious expression on the slack-jawed face of the muttering thing advancing on her, or the way the instrument gripped fiercely in its hand has begun to writhe and twist from side to side, as though it has come alive and urgently seeks to escape its captor. She has only to wait, as they have waited for her, and she is confident the wait will not be a long one. The creature picks its way forward through the morass of mud and shit and piss-tainted water, moving with as much speed and agility as its twisted limbs are capable.
And then, here, the familiar is passed straightaway, and Beryl’s understanding of exactly what awaits her grows abruptly less definite, since it is from this instant on that her dreams have often varied and contradicted one another. For the first time, she fears something more than dismissal. For the first time since she has entered this chamber, she fears the unknown, however many or however few seconds still lie ahead of her and whatever they do or do not hold in store. From here, she can doubt herself, as she has not yet seen—even in dreams—what is to come, and so she cannot begin to guess whether she is equal to those ordeals.
The oyster-skinned creature who was once a man called Zebidiah If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Wilmarth squats below her, so near that she can feel his every hot, foul breath against her face. And suddenly faith is no longer sufficient, and the woman from Above opens her eyes and stares down into the face of the one who will be her executioner. There is an unexpected and indescribable softness in his black, eyes, a compassion she would never have anticipated, for what and who is she to find mercy among such as they? But there it is, unmistakable, regardless of her presumptions. A cast to that ruined and perfected face that she cannot mistake for deceit or only cruel misdirection. This empathy is genuine as her devotion to the pit dwellers, and finally she can allow herself to weep—not from the ravages of pain or dread or any shortcomings of her soul, but from relief and a duty to acknowledge the courtesy in her master’s face.
Perhaps it is no more than her exhausted imagination, but Beryl seems to “hear” a raw and grinding voice speaking directly within her mind. Nothing which will be done here is done without your acquiescence, it whispers. No liberties will be taken. This is the Law, and the Law is eternal and inviolable. And then the voice withdraws, and the creature’s face, by slow degrees, drains of its commiseration. Beryl nods, though she knows that the nod is irrelevant to what comes next, and the creature’s thin, pale lips stretch themselves wide in a ragged sort of grimace, exposing its crooked fangs and bucked incisors set firmly into rotten gums. But Beryl’s cloudy half-consciousness grasps the necessity of this exchange, that there may be no misunderstandings, and that her sacrifice will be untarnished by any equivocation.
The wasted thing squatting in the mud shows her the instrument, sent to them by the sea, lost therein for five hundred million years after it fell from the stars, adrift in the near-vacuum of inter stellar space a billion years before that, snagged by Earth’s insistent gravity, it fell, streaming incandescent gases. It has witnessed the demise of the trilobites and of the giant sea scorpions, has lain in benthic silt beneath the eel-like shadows of reptilian leviathans and watched on as the heretical grandfathers of the great whales abandoned land and returned to the oceans. Seeing it, Beryl knows that it has always hungered for her, just as it has hungered for all who have come before and who will come afterwards. It is beautiful and glorious and undeniable. It is a stray mote from the collective and insentient will of the Cosmos, the shard from an angel’s broken sword, a bit of refuse spewed across the event horizon of a white hole. It wriggles eagerly in the hand of the misshapen subterranean being who is not its keeper, but only its servant, and only that until its indisputable will chooses another.
Recollecting some diminished and useless appetite, the creature that was once Wilmarth raises the gnarled and taloned hook of its right hand and tries clumsily to caress Beryl’s exposed breasts, her belly and thighs, the matted thatch of her pubic hair, and she does not resist him. But the instrument clutched in his other hand shrieks its protest and begins to smolder. Beryl catches a whiff of seared flesh, and the creature stops fondling her.
“I am ready,” she says, speaking now for no one but herself, an affirmation to close a life that never could have led her anywhere but here, below the streets, and then below all that lies below the streets. And the oyster-skinned creature blinks his ebony eyes, and without further pomp or ceremony, he slits her open, sternum to crotch, and now comes the rich red flood and fleeting mitigation for their thirst, and all the greedy mouths rush in to drink their well-deserved fill.
The Collector of Bones
From the rainy February street and the taxi, the collector of bones leads the boy through the lobby of the apartment building to the elevator, and hardly a word passes between them as cables and gears haul them all the way up to the fifteenth floor. The collector of bones is not a young woman, but she also is not a poor woman, and has long since discovered that she can have her pick of the hookers and hustlers who sell themselves on the streets of the city. Money talks, and meat listens and eagerly responds. This boy, twenty or twenty-one, but certainly no older than twenty-one, this one she picked up at Twelfth Street between Second and Third Avenues, and sure he’s a junky, but his addiction only makes the meat that much more eager. That much more vulnerable. The elevator smells like melting snow and stale cigarette smoke, like her perfume and the boy’s unwashed body, and each time they pass a floor, a hidden bell somewhere dings loudly, and every ti
me it dings, the boy flinches. He must be so very new at this, the collector of bones thinks to herself, to be so jumpy, and that thought is the first thing all night that’s made her smile. The bell dings again, and the doors slide open, and she’s glad that there’s no one waiting to ride down to the lobby.
“This is our stop,” she says to the boy, and so he flinches again. “Everyone ashore who’s going ashore.” And she tells him to relax, that she’s not quite the Big Bad Wolf or the witch who tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. The boy smiles his nervous smile, and she almost asks him if its heroin or crack or something else. From the look of him, she thinks it’s probably heroin, but she’s always thought it impolite to pry.
Her apartment is all the way down at one end of the long hallway, on the north side of the building, next to the window that has been painted shut and so no longer actually leads out to the rickety fire escape beyond. The boy wipes at his nose while she unlocks the door, and she asks him if he has a cold, and he tells her no, that it’s just his sinuses, that he’s had bad sinuses all his life.
“Well,” she says, “you can’t be too careful with colds, not in this sort of weather, and not when someone spends as much time out of doors as you must.” Then they’re inside, and she offers him tea or coffee, and he frowns, so she offers him something strong, instead. He takes a brandy, and it hardly matters that it isn’t good brandy.
After she has handed him the glass, and after he’s taken the first hesitant sip, she asks for his damp coat, which he surrenders without a fuss. It stinks, she thinks, like some ugly little terrier sort of dog that’s gotten caught in a downpour, and she hangs it on a brass hook near the door where it’ll only drip on the avocado-colored ceramic tiles near the threshold and not on the rugs or the hardwood floors. The boy stands near a bookshelf, sipping at his brandy and, she supposes, glancing at the titles printed on the spines.
Forming the wrong impression, she thinks, and by now he’s probably at least half convinced himself she’s some sort of serial killer. One among that slim eight percent of American mass murderers with vaginas, possibly, and here, poor thing, he’s been unlucky enough to stumble upon her. It amuses her, that he might be thinking this; flinchy or not, he isn’t likely to lose his nerve and run, not now, not one hurting as bad as this one’s obviously hurting, not one who needs his fix that badly. She stands just a few feet away, watching him, deciding whether to tease or maybe ask, instead, where he’s from and how he wound up turning tricks on the streets of Manhattan. She decides to tease him, because it’s been a while since she’s had one this jumpy, and if she’s wrong and worse comes to worse, if he turns rabbit, it’s not too late in the evening to find another.
“So,” she smiles, “which sort do you think I’ll be? An angel of death, perhaps, intent upon ending the suffering of my victims? Or simply a sexual predator?”
The boy turns away from the bookshelf so quickly that he almost spills his drink. “What?’” he asks and blinks at her, and she thinks that his bleary eyes are the same color as unpolished emeralds.
“Or maybe I’m something; new,” she continues, only half ashamed at his reaction “Or my motives are entirely 100 difficult to discern, so I don’t fit neatly into the categories created by FBI profilers and psychiatrist.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
“Sure you were,” the collector of bones smirks at the sniffling, skinny boy. “But that’s okay. Misconceptions are easy to come by, and I’ve long since learned to take them in stride. Water off a duck’s rump and so forth and so on.” She points to his glass. “Then again, maybe I put arsenic in the brandy,” she says.
“Yeah, and maybe you just get your kicks scaring people,” he snaps back, surprising her, and the collector of bones is impressed enough to laugh, having grown accustomed to prostitutes with considerably less pluck and more street-smart trepidation. “Maybe that’s your kink, lady.”
“Oh, for fuel’s sake, child. Don’t start in calling me lady. So, I might not be a serial killer, but I’m sure as hell no lady. If you’re pissed and want to insult me, just cut to the chase and tell me that I’m a dried-up old hag. At least then you’ll be half right.”
“I know you didn’t bring me here to kill me,” he says unconvincingly, and tales another sip of brandy.
“How’s that? I mean, how can you be so sure?” she asks, pressing her luck again. And there, she thinks, that’s my true perversity, and the collector of bones savors the uncertainty, the slightest possibility he’ll turn tail and head back to the elevator, back down to the slushy sidewalk and someone who won’t ask for anything more than a twenty-dollar blow job.
“Just a hunch,” the boy replies, trying hard to smirk back at her, but not quite pulling it off. “I get hunches. My grandmother used to tell me I was psychic like that.”
“Did she?” asks the collector of bones. “Did she, indeed?” and the boy nods his head and finishes the brandy in a single gulp, wincing slightly ;it the way the liquor burns his throat.
“Sometimes my dreams come true,” he says, handing her his empty glass, and when she offers him another, he says sure, why not.
“Here I pay for a common streetwalker, and I get a bona-fide clairvoyant. That’s got to be some sort of bargain. Maybe I should start playing the lottery.”
The boy sniffs and wipes his nose again, glancing around the apartment while she pours him more of the cheap brandy. “Doesn’t much look like you’re the sort who needs to,” he says. do all right,” she tells him, handing the glass back to the boy. “But you won’t ask at what, because that’s none of your business, and I wouldn’t tell you, anyway.”
“I’d guess you married well, and the fucker died and left you everything. If I were to guess, but since it’s none of my business, I won’t.”
The collector of bones screws the cap back onto the brandy bottle and sets it aside. “Don’t go and get so drunk you’ll be useless,” she warns him.
The boy shrugs his shoulders, and he says, “Oh, I can hold my own.” So she laughs at him again, and this time he makes a face like she really has hurt his feelings. “Never mind,” the collector of bones tells the boy, and then she asks him to get undressed, and she slips out of her skirt and blouse and stockings while he watches. She gives him a condom, and then they spend half an hour fucking on the sofa, and she comes twice, which is better than usual. Most times,she doesn’t come at all, though she’s never yet blamed any of the whores for her own limitations. Afterwards, he asks for another drink, and this time she gives him the bottle, what’s left of the bottle, and tells him to finish it.
They sit naked together on the sofa, him drinking brandy and her watching him getting drunk, and it isn’t long before he asks why she offered him three times what he usually gets just to fuck.
“You’re not done quite yet,” she replies, and then she stands and walks across the room to the bookshelf, and she pretends that he’s watching her because he likes what he sees and not because he’s wondering what comes next. She opens a small box carved from sandalwood—something she bought on a business trip to Indonesia half a lifetime ago. Inside is a key strung on a faded length of silk ribbon the color of cranberries. She takes it out and closes the box again, and then the collector of bones turns back to the boy and holds the key up so it catches the dim light and she’s certain that he can see it.
“What’s that?” he asks, slurring just a little now, “It’s a key,” she says unhelpfully.
“I can see it’s a goddamn key,” he mutters and starts picking at the foil label on the brandy bottle. “What I’m asking is what it’s a key to?”
“The key to the reason I’m paying you so 11111(11,” and then she says for him to follow her, not to bother with his clothes, just follow her. The boy sighs and shakes his head, but he does as he’s told. Money talks, and the flesh listens. She leads him down a short hall to a door that looks in no way different from any of the other doors in the a
partment, except, of course, that she’s made sure he knows that it’s the door that fits the key from the little box, And that makes it the sort of door to be regarded with caution, the sort of door, for example, from a Charles Perrault fairytale about a man with a blue beard and a young wife too curious for her own good.
“Have you ever heard of an ossuary?” she asks the boy as she unlocks the door, as the door swings slowly open, and he says no, he’s never heard of an ossuary. The room is dark, but there’s a switch on the wall by the door, and she flips it, winch saves her the trouble of explaining to the whore what an ossuary is and isn’t. All he has to do is look at the thousands of bones covering nearly every inch of the room, the walls and the ceiling and the floor, all of it clearly illuminated now by tasteful incandescent tracklighting to reveal shades of tortoiseshell and ivory, cream and ginger, innumerable greys and browns.
“Fuck,” he whispers.
“No, we did that already,” she says, because she’s tired and it’s too easy and she can’t help herself. She watches the boy’s eyes as he studies the intricate arrangements of ribs and femora, humeri and countless vertebrae.
“You did this?” he asks.
“Yes,” she replies. “I did this. Well, technically, I still am doing this. A work in progress, as they are wont to say. Truthfully, I’m not sure that it will ever be finished. Or that I’ll know if it is. Finished, I mean.”
The boy steps into the room without being told to do so, and his unpolished-emerald eyes are wide, and his mouth is hanging open just a bit.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 5