Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Long minutes pass, and you haven’t said a word. Upon entering, your footsteps were almost impossible to detect. This is another part of the game that varies wildly. Sometimes, your feet are loud against the floor, and sometimes they’re muffled and virtually inaudible. Sometimes, you tiptoe with bare feet, and sometimes you brazenly stomp about in hard-soled shoes with sharp stiletto heels. Tonight, you are at your most noiseless, silent as the most accomplished sneak thief, and I don’t even bother hazarding a guess as to where you’re sitting or standing, kneeling or crouching, at how near or far from me you might be.

  I lie very still, and I wait. Time passes, though I have no way of reckoning how much or how little of it comes and goes. I think perhaps I can hear you breathing, somewhere in front of me, but I can’t be sure. I close my eyes when motes of nonexistent light begin to dance before them, though that doesn’t really help very much.

  I close my eyes, and I wait.

  And, finally, I begin to wonder if maybe you’ve mastered some new bit of legerdemain, and have slipped out without my having seen or heard you go. It may be, I think, that I am alone in the black room, and the thought brings a sudden and inexplicable wave of panic. You would surely deem that an elegant new strategy, and give yourself a gold star for being so clever. I open my eyes again, thinking perhaps I might have dozed off, that I may have lain here asleep, surrounded by nothing at all but the smothering, absolute darkness. That’s happened before. And then, as if you can now count telepathy among your arts, you whisper my name. You only whisper, but in this silent black room that we have fashioned, a whisper can be a thunderclap, and it startles me so badly there’s a rush of adrenaline that leaves my heart pounding, and I feel sick and even more disoriented.

  “Not getting bored, I hope,” you say, still whispering. You’re in fine form tonight, and your voice betrays not even the slightest hint of your gender or age, and no trace of emotion, either. It could be anyone’s voice, or the voice of no one, at all. And you’ve long since learned to pitch it in such a way that I’m incapable of knowing from which direction it’s coming, so those five words, those six stingy syllables, are no help whatsoever in revealing where you are.

  “I’m not bored,” I reply, not bothering to whisper, and then I clear my dry throat and struggle to sit upright.

  “How can I be sure?” you ask. There’s still no trace of you in your voice, and it occurs to me (as it has on other nights) that maybe you’ve found someone to act as your surrogate, that I might be in the black room with a complete stranger, or a close friend, or with the most casual of acquaintances.

  “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I don’t know how you can be sure, how I’m supposed to convince you.”

  “But I assume you do understand that it poses a problem, my uncertainty?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, obviously, of course.” And then there’s a soft sound, and I can’t quite seem to find the language to describe it. A soft sound. The best I can do is say that it puts me in mind of someone punching a pillow. But that’s not right, not really. Its a much softer sound than that. It seems to have come from somewhere on my left.

  “If you have grown bored,” you continue, “then the solution is self-evident, wouldn’t you think?”

  “But I’m not bored,” I tell you again, trying very hard to imbue the words with conviction, though I’m beginning; to grow impatient, and maybe a little angry, too. I know this is merely some fresh tactic you’ve devised to throw me off my guard, and I know also that it’s my place to play along and see where it’s leading. On some level, I don’t doubt these things. On another, there is an unfamiliar irritation growing inside me, as whatever expectations I might have had, and whatever desires, whatever tensions, are defused by these unexpected questions.

  “Well, you don’t seem particularly enthusiastic,” you say, and there’s a laugh. A high, cold laugh. But I’m almost certain that it’s not you laughing. Indeed, I’m fairly sure that the laughter began a second or two before you finished speaking.

  “Who else is in the room with us?” I ask, and I realize that I’m sweating.

  “It’s not your place to question,” you remind me. “Right now, the only thing you should be concerned with is making me believe that you’re not bored.”

  We have a sate word, of course, but I’ve never yet used it. I’ve never even come close. But now, I mouth it silently, my tongue and lips forming its exact shape. The irritation I felt a few moments earlier has become, instead, a ballooning anxiety, and there’s an unaccustomed confusion in me, as well. One half the object of our game has always been to frighten me, and there have been plenty of occasions when I’ve been left rattled for hours afterwards. Once or twice, you’ve scared me badly enough that I’ve actually pissed myself. Once , I even vomited. But we’ve both counted this as evidence of success, of that genius arising from what you’ve labeled the game’s inherent elegance. You are here,in this black room, to scare me, and I am here to be scared.

  “Maybe,” you say, “the problem is that I’m bored, dear. And, maybe, the solution isn’t to stop playing, but simply to stop playing with you.” And this time, you sound exactly like you, and I think that must be intended to be as menacing as what you’re saying. I can’t doubt that I’m hearing these things from your lips; I can only doubt whether or not you mean them.

  I sit there, sweating, my pulse racing, waiting for the laugh I heard before, but this time it doesn’t come.

  “Do you think you could find someone else who’d play?” I ask, though my throat is almost too parched to speak. “By your rules, I mean!”

  “Dear, what if I already have?” you reply, your voice louder than before.

  A stinging drop of sweat runs across my forehead and into my right eye. If my hands were free, I could wipe it away. If my hands were free, I could release myself from the chain attached to the ring bolt set into the room’s wall, I could stand up and walk to the door...

  “It would be a damned shame, if that’s the case,” you say, whispering again, and once more affecting that ageless, sexless tone. And this is when I feel the blade at my throat, pressed firmly into the soft nook beneath my chin. It isn’t cold, the steel, not like I would have expected it to be, if I’d been expecting it. Maybe it’s a small knife, or possibly a straight razor; it’s impossible for me to tell which. “We’ve had such a very, very good time, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” I tell you, and lick my dry lips. “We’ve had a wonderful time.”

  From somewhere near the door, the laughter comes again, but I stay perfectly still, because there’s no way of knowing how sharp the blade you’re holding is. Maybe, it’s so dull it wouldn’t slice hot butter. Or maybe, it’s sharp enough that any sudden movement of my head to one side or the other would be sufficient to break the skin. Or open an artery.

  “This is what I want,” you whisper. “I want you to sit here and think about everything I’ve said. I want you to sit here, and be perfectly, completely quiet until I come back for you. Do you think you can manage that?”

  I don’t dare nod, so I tell you yes, even though I’m not sure if I should speak, either. I say yes, and you tell me I’m a such good girl, and that you’re proud of me, and then you take the blade away from my throat and kiss me gently on the cheek.

  “I’ll be back later,” you say. “I’ll be back later, and maybe we’ll play a little more.”

  You cross the room to the door, and I can hear the soles of your bare feet against the painted wood, faint, but clearly audible.

  “Remember what I just told you. Not a peep,” and you turn the deadbolt, unlocking the door. When it opens, the silhouette against the red glow from the hallway is only your silhouette, undisguised and immediately recognizable. I understand you want to admit no reasonable doubt that you’re leaving. You pull the door closed behind you, and the unblemished darkness returns.

  I try not to dwell on the laughter that couldn’t have been yours, or the fact that no on
e followed you out. Instead, I lie back down and shut my eyes again. And here, in the black room at the center of this game that I have always imagined is ours, and only ours, I wait for you to comeback for me.

  The Peril of Liberated Objects,

  or The Voyeur’s Seduction

  Arabella Hopestill can no longer recall, precisely, where or when she acquired the ancient red book. She remembers only that the day was very, very hot, so she assumes it was during the summer, or possibly early autumn. It was a hot day, and the air stank of dust and mothballs and her own sour sweat, and oftentimes she thinks that there were many other books involved. It seems, sometimes, there was a sort of necessary trial to gain this treasure, the task of choosing this one book from among hundreds or thousands of others. But the truth, which she has not yet even begun to suspect, is that the book acquired her, as has always been, and ever shall be, its way. In the millennium since it escaped the dreamlands, it has only once, briefly, been bound by the will of a human being, and, in the end, that man paid dearly for the privilege and the insult.

  But Arabella Hopestill knows nothing of the red book’s captivity at the hands of that forgotten Italian astrologer and alchemist—now five-hundred years dead and buried in the catacombs beneath Palermo—any more than she knows of the book’s origins in the onyx seaport of Inquanok, below the towering, polished walls of the Temple of the Elder Ones. She does not know of the inhuman priests who there guarded it in lightless subterranean chambers. Or of the accident or miscalculation that allowed it to slip, at last, from their watchful gaze and be carried across the sea to Celephaïs in Ooth-Nargai, and from there, in time to the basalt towers of Dylath-Leen, and on to Nir and Ulthar, and across the green plains bordering the River Skai. Arabella will never guess at the dire pact that allowed the nameless red book to find its way past the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, then up the seventy steps to the waking world. These things are secrets the book has hidden from all prying eyes and minds, that it might never be delivered back into the hands of its keepers in the Temple of the Elder Ones.

  Arabella knows only that she can no longer bear to live without the book. Even the thought of someday losing it brings cold sweats and sleepless nights. She has spent too many years in its company, and is terrified at the prospect of her life devoid of the unspeakable, perverse revelations it readily surrenders whenever she takes it down from its place on a particularly high shelf and opens the red leather covers. The paper is brittle, and gone the yellowish brown of fossil ivory. There is no title page, for the book was never named. There is no author, for it needed none. Indeed, there’s not a single written word to be found anywhere inside the volume, It is not a book of letters, but a book of images. One does not simply read the red book. Rather, it reads the fondest nightmares and most repressed appetites of those who gaze into it, and subsequently shows them what they have always longed to see (even though they may never have been conscious of these longings). In this way, it might fairly be said to be as much a mirror as a book, and Arabella Hopestill, lost and alone and content for the first time in her life, has become a devotee to its endless reflections.

  She has little use of any other looking glass, having been convinced when still a young woman that she was too plain to be of interest to any lover, far too humdrum and dim-witted to attract a suitor of any stripe, and hopelessly beyond even the most remote chance for marriage. “Hardly fit for whoring, this one,” a comely man said to her, the same year she turned twenty. He told her that, spoke those six words, then laughed, and whatever atrophied stub of dignity and self worth had managed to survive the first two decades of her life was entirely consumed in that instant.

  The book has become her lover, or so she sometimes pretends. The book has become all she will ever need.

  This evening in August, Arabella lays the book on a table near an open window, so that she can feel and smell the cool salt breeze blowing in off the harbor. There’s no light in the room but the feeble glow of the moon (two nights past the first quarter), getting in through that window. She’s learned that the book is at its most forthcoming when kept away from the harsh glare of electric bulbs, and that even candlelight can mute the visions it offers up. She opens it at random, seeking no particular page, and there’s a faint whistling sort of noise, as though she has unsealed a vacuum, but it only lasts a moment. Then the room is quiet, save the sound of the traffic on the street below, muffled voices from the apartment next door, the songs of night birds, and the eager pounding of her own caged heart.

  “Show ire,” she whispers. “Show me something I haven’t seen before. Show me something new, and something awful.”

  And, immediately, the book obliges, as it always does. The blank page on Arabella’s right goes suddenly sooty and strangely translucent. She has the distinct impression that some inner, halfconcealed luminosity is struggling to tear itself free of the paper, something caught for unknown eons between the covers like a wasp sealed in a lump of amber. If it is a. struggle, and not merely an overture before the curtain rises, it never lasts long, and seconds later she’s gazing into and through the red book, at a small meadow surrounded on all sides by spruces and oaks grown so lofty their uppermost boughs seem to rasp at the exposed belly of the sky. Across the green meadow, violet blooms of columbine compete with anemones and starry yellow flowers that Arabella doesn’t recognize. There’s a wide brook winding through the meadow, and its banks are muddy and crowded with reeds, starwort, and water-crowfoot. Here and there, the brook ripples and furls as it glides smoothly over a barely submerged outcropping of stone.

  “Something awful,” she says again, as though possibly, the book misunderstood the first time.

  And then she sees the unicorn and the maiden, not far from the brook. They must surely have been there all along, but, somehow, she didn’t see them before. The woman is very young, and her dress, which hangs from her in shreds, seems to have been woven of golden thread, the way the tatters shine beneath the bright sun falling across the meadow. Even the muddy spatters do not seem to diminish the gleam of that golden dress. The woman is down on her hands and knees, and her long auburn hair hides her face from view. She seems to grip the earth as if she’s afraid of falling. Not down, for surely she cannot fall any farther down, but up, into the wide sky sprawling blue and vacant and hungry above the meadow. Her fingers are sunk deep into the mud.

  “Yes,” Arabella whispers. “Thank you. Yes.” She once dreamed this scene, many years ago, though she has no recollection of the dream. The book knows all the dreams of men, and of many other beings, besides, and vomits them forth whenever it sees fit.

  This unicorn is a true unicorn, not merely a white mare with a horn sprouting from its skull. In equal measure it resembles a billy-goat, or a doe, or some fabulous species of white antelope, as much as it resembles any horse. Its restless tail is very like that of a lion, and the spiraling horn that is its namesake could have been plucked from the upper left maxilla of a bull narwhal. It stands over the woman, snorting and stamping at the muddy ground with its cloven hooves. It’s prodigious cock is almost the same exact shade of red as the leather in which the book is bound. The unicorn bares its teeth, and when it snorts, steam seems to billow from its flaring nostrils.

  So, this is the scene being played out upon the page for Anibella, the fallen woman trampled beneath the feet of an angry, rutting unicorn. And Arabella looks as closely as she can, squinting to note each and every detail, no matter how terrible or minute or seemingly inconsequential, drinking it all in, for she’s learned that the book never gives up the same vision twice. And this is one she knows she’ll want to savor again and again and again.

  The unicorn bows its shaggy head, and with that gleaming horn, tears away what’s left of the golden dress. With another swipe of the horn, it leaves a deep gash in the pale flesh of the woman’s lower back. She screams, in pain and fear, and then the unicorn mounts her. She tries to struggle free, to shake the beast off and
crawl towards the brook. But thick roots and vines burst from the mire and twine themselves tightly about her wrists and ankles and throat, as though Nature herself has conspired against the maiden, or, Arabella thinks, as though the unicorn commands all green and growing things. The woman screams again when the creature enters her.

  Arabella licks at her thin, dry lips and grips the edges of the table by the open window.

  -And in the dreamlands, past the seventy steps and through the wild, enchanted fungal woods that lie just beyond the Gate of Deeper Slumber, past the River Skai and the narrow, cobbled streets of Ulthar and across the shimmering sea in the onyx: city of Celephais, the priests within the sixteen-sided Temple of the Elder Ones pause in their prayers. Even after so many centuries, they have not lost all connection to the nameless red book, and in those hours when it works its deceits in the waking world, they bleed a foul, caustic ichor from their palms and the bottoms of their feet. Far below the Temple, in the catacombs that once imprisoned the tome, one among their number has been chained in its place, as a constant reminder of their inexcusable failure. This unfortunate, become a sort of willing surrogate, bears the greater part of their conjunction with the escaped book. The martyr’s tongue was cut out, that he might never utter the fell apparitions the book reveals to those waking women and men who, like Arabella Hopestill, have become catalysts for its depredations. What the chained priest bleeds is not to be described.

  Arabella stares into the page, while the red book stares into her, and by way of its immemorial sorceries she feels every bit of the maiden’s hurt and terror and humiliation, her outrage and despair. But Arabella Hopestill also is given access to all the sensations and sentiments of the unicorn. She tastes the violated woman’s blood upon its tongue, and grows drunk with waves of triumph and boundless cruelty that infects all immortal beings. She perceives the unicorn’s every violent thrust, but is no less the victim than the rapist, no more the ravager than she is the ravaged, broken maiden. And she would have it no other way. The experiences the book bequeaths to her would be incomplete and entirely unsatisfying were she given only one half of any of its tableaus (or, in other, more elaborate cases, were she given only a third,or a fifth, or one fiftieth).