Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I will place this manuscript, and all the related documents I have gathered, in my safety deposit box, and then I will try to return to the life I was living before Thurber’s death. But I cannot forget a line from the suicide note of the screenwriter, Joseph Chapman—how does a man forget, deliberately and wholly and forever, once he has glimpsed such sights. How, indeed. And, too, I cannot forget that woman’s eyes, that stony, sea-tumbled shade of grey. Or a rough shadow glimpsed in the final moments of a film that might have been made in 1923 or 1924, that may have been titled The Hounds Daughter or The Necrophile, I know the dreams will not desert me, not now nor at some future time, but I pray for such fortune as to have seen the last of the waking horrors that my foolish, prying mind has called forth.

  At the Gate of Deeper Slumber

  05.

  It would be easier if I were only watching her die. But I know that I’m witnessing; something far worse, a transition that will not conclude with the finality and peaceful oblivion of death. She’s alone inside the wide circle we prepared with a paste of white chalk and pig’s blood, and I’ve sworn to Suzanne that I’ll never dare cross its terrible circumference, no matter what I might see or hear, and no matter what she may say. She is alone in there with the metal box and what it contains, and I am alone out here, with all the world about me. It only seems as though the world has gone away. It only seems that the entire universe has somehow contracted down to a space no farther across than the diameter of her circle. It would be easier, perhaps, if this dwindling of the cosmos were more than an illusion.

  Two women, alone together, at the end of all that ever was and will ever be.

  That would be easier.

  Suzanne lies shivering on her left side, her eyes following me as I use the stub of a charcoal pencil to retrace the ring of protective runes and symbols about the periphery of the circle. I’ve lost track now of how many times I’ve drawn them on the hardwood floor. I draw them, and the wood absorbs them, or they evaporate, or simply cease to be. I can’t say which; it hardly matters. I can only keep watch and restore them each time the thing inside the box, the shining thing trapped inside the circle with Suzanne, takes them away.

  I am trying to think of it as nothing more insidious than an infection—a virus or bacterium—this force slowly devouring and transfiguring her. But that’s a lie, a bald-faced lie, and I’ve never been a very good liar.

  “Is it morning:” she asks, her voice hardly more than a raw whisper. I look Lip at the tall windows, at the summer sun streaming in, but the daylight seems far away and completely inconsequential. I know the thing inside the box is preventing the light from entering our circle, and that there’s only darkness for Suzanne. I saw it very briefly, before she pushed me away. I saw it, and, what’s more, I felt it, that black that would put even the perpetual night at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to shame.

  “Yes, it is,” I reply. “It’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue. There are no clouds, and the sky is blue.”

  “Nothing’s getting past me,” she says, and then I nod and go back to drawing on the floorboards. I want to say more, want to tell her anything reassuring, anything that’s comforting, but, like I said, I’m a shitty liar. And Suzanne has moved forever beyond reassurances and comfort. She makes a hurtful sound that’s almost like crying, and I try hard not to look. I’ve seen too much already, and every new glimpse only weakens my resolve. I can’t possibly help her. No one and nothing can. And I can’t run away and leave the circle untended, anymore than I could leave Suzanne more alone than she is already. So, I grit my teeth and scribble at the varnished wood with my bit of charcoal pencil. The room is hot, and a rivulet of sweat runs down my forehead, into my left eye; I try to blink it away.

  “I know the names of the messenger,” she mutters hoarsely, and I think it’s a miracle she can still talk after what the thing in the box has done with her lips and teeth and tongue. I wouldn’t exactly call that seeping hole in her face a mouth, not anymore. “The Black Pharaoh, I know all the names he’s ever worn.”

  “Well, do me just one goddamn favor,” I tell her, and I know I’m being selfish. “Do us both a favor, and keep them to yourself.”

  “He so loves to hear his names spoken aloud by living beings,” Suzanne whispers. There’s a wet, shuddering sound from inside the circle, and she’s silent again. But there’s no mercy in her silence. I think there’s no mercy remaining, or, more likely, mercy was only ever a fairy tale we told ourselves to get from one minute to the next. At the edge of this circle, in the presence of the thing not quite held inside that box, all our cherished illusions ravel and diminish. This, I suspect, is why the charcoal symbols on the floor dissolve almost as quickly as I can draw them. They were never more than symbols, never anything more vital than wishful thinking. Benevolent gods have not bequeathed us any safeguard against the void, and all our desperate sorceries have conjured only impotent figments.

  I know this, as surely as I know that the glistening trapezohedral engine inside the box is corrupting and reshaping her to suit the needs of whatever made it, however many innumerable eons ago. It is an open window, and some abomination on the other side is gazing through it into her, even as she is gazing across those unfathomable gulfs of time and space into the watcher on the other side.

  From the open box Suzanne fished out of a rocky tidal pool, I can hear the pipes playing again, and also the frantic, careless footfalls of the dancers who swoop and careen and howl before the throne of Chaos. Bleeding from all the symmetrically staggered kite-faces of the shining trapezohedron, I clearly hear that toneless, monotonous music. It would be so easy, I think, to join Suzanne. Easy and just. This is the most wicked deed in all my life, allowing her to face the abyss alone.

  And I finally raise my head and look directly at her for the first time in hours, and, in this moment, I understand that I am exactly the same sort of coward as Perseus, only braving the countenance of Medusa secondhand, and that Suzanne has become a warrior’s polished shield.

  03.

  We’re lying together in bed. I kiss her, and she tastes like the sea. Or maybe it’s only the smell from the shop below her tiny, cluttered apartment on Wickenden Street, the place that sells tropical fish and aquariums, that I’m mistaking for the taste of her. But that’s never happened before. Too many things are happening that have never happened before. For example, I look into her eyes, and for a moment I’m unable to find her in her eyes. For that moment, I see nothing that could ever be confused with humanity. And then she blinks, and smiles, and Suzanne’s eyes are only Suzanne again.

  “Its under the bed,” she says, though I haven’t asked where she’s keeping the box from the tide pool.

  “Couldn’t you think of some other place to keep it? Someplace that isn’t under the bed?”

  “It doesn’t bother you, does it?” she asks, still smiling, and I believe she’s only pretending to sound surprised. Of course, it bother? me, just the thought of the metal box and its contents stashed in the shadows and dust beneath us. It bothers me that it was there while I made love to her, and that I didn’t know. It bothers me that we didn’t leave it where she found it almost a week ago, washed up among the rocks, stranded with the kelp and crabs below the lighthouse.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, it makes me a little nervous,” I admit, reluctantly, and Suzanne laughs and nuzzles my naked breasts, Her lips brush across my left nipple, and I flinch. I can’t say why, not exactly. Only that there is some unexpected and almost painful sensation from that brief contact, something that causes me to flinch. I cannot describe it, except by contradictory analogies. It feels like a static shock. It feels like an ice cube pressed against my skin. It feels sharp and hot, like the needle of a tattoo gun.

  She looks up at me and frowns.

  “It’s just a strange old box,” she says.

  “Well, there must be some other place in the apartment where you can keep it, besides under the bed.” I’m trying not t
o appear unreasonable. After all, it’s not my apartment, or my bed. But if her expression is any indication, I’m not doing a very good job.

  “Sure,” Suzanne says, raising herself on one elbow and staring at me. “If it upsets you that much, I’ll move it. I can stash it on top of the bookcase, or in the bottom of the closet. You want to pick which?”

  “The closet seems like a pretty good idea,” I reply, and she sighs end nods her head.

  “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you spooked like this,” she says, getting out of bed and pulling on her bathrobe. It’s the one I gave her last Christmas, dark red sateen with white roses. She doesn’t cinch the belt or tie it, but lets the robe hang open.

  “So, are you disappointed?” I ask her, watching Suzanne as she stoops to retrieve the box from beneath the bed. “Maybe having second thoughts?”

  “No, I’m most definitely not having second thoughts. It’s just, you always try to come on so butch and all, and now you’re creeped out by an old box.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a fucking creepy old box,” I say, “and you know it’s fucking creepy.” Then she stands again, holding it in both her hands. It isn’t at all heavy. I know that because I’m the one who carried it from the tide pool back to her car. The whitish-yellow metal gleams dully in the glow from the lamp on the bedside table. The hinged lid and each side of the box has been stamped or engraved with bas-relief images, worn and dented now, but still plainly discernable. I think the designs are meant to depict living creatures, but they put me in mind of nothing so much as the biomechanoid monstrosities of H. R. Giger’s paintings and sculptures. I don’t like looking at the box’s grotesqueries, and yet I find it very hard to look away. Giger’s work has always had this same morbid affect on me.

  Suzanne carries the box across the small bedroom and opens the closet door, then stands staring for a moment at the disarray of clothing jammed inside.

  “You’re saying it doesn’t make you uncomfortable?” I ask. “Not even a little bitty bit?” She shrugs, and sets the box down on the floor. Then Suzanne begins excavating a hole in her dirty laundry, making a space large enough that the metal box can sit on the closet floor. She tosses a pair of jeans over her shoulder, and they land not far from the foot of the bed, the legs splayed in different directions.

  “I want to know what it is,” she tells me. “I want to know what it is, and where it came from, and who made it, and why.”

  “You don’t want very much, do you?”

  “Only the moon,” she laughs again. “And don’t you go telling me how curiosity killed the cat. I never met a cat yet who would have been better off without curiosity.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “Good,” she says, and out comes a great wad of panties and T-shirts and more jeans. “But, if you swear you won’t freak out, there is something weird. I made some rubbings of the box this afternoon. One from each side.”

  I roll over on my back and stare at the ceiling, wishing that I had a cigarette, that Suzanne hadn’t convinced me to quit. “Something weird,” I say, like a wary echo.

  “Well, the box has six sides, right, like most boxes. I mean, it’s basically a hollow cube. And I used one sheet of paper for each side. But, and here’s where it gets weird, when I was finished, I had eight rubbings on eight sheets of paper. I didn’t even realize that I was making eight rubbings, not until it was over.”

  “You lost track and did two of the sides twice,” I suggest, but my mouth has gone dry, and there’s goose flesh on my arms. I doubt I sound anything like convincing.

  “Sure, I thought of that, right off. But when I compared the rubbings, they were all different. And when I tried to match them all up with the images on the box, I could only find six. On the box, I mean.”

  I sit up and stare at her. Suzanne has her back to me. She’s just placed the box inside the closet, and is busy piling dirty clothes in on top of it.

  “And then, after that, you put it beneath the bed?” I ask.

  “It’s only a box,” she says again and shuts the closet door. “I’m sure I’ll figure it all out later. Weird shit like that happens, you know? But you can’t let it go and freak you out. When I was a little girl, I was sure I’d seen a sea monster, but, turned out, it was only a seal.”

  I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, trying not to think about the box or the shining thing inside, and unable to think of anything else. In a minute or two, she comes back to bed.

  04.

  It’s almost dark, and I’m watching something on television when Suzanne gets back from Salem. I reach for the remote, press a button, and the screen instantly goes black. She’s complaining about the traffic between Boston and Providence, and about Boston drivers, in general. I sip at the glass of cheap Scotch I’ve been nursing for the last half hour. All the ice has melted, and the sides of the tumbler are slick with beads of condensation. I try not to notice the oddly intimate way she’s holding the box, and I’m grateful when she sets it down on the kitchen counter. I’m grateful when she’s no longer touching it.

  “Well, that wasn’t altogether unprofitable,” Suzanne says, and then sits down on one of the barstools at the counter. There are three of them, the cushions upholstered in some sort of shiny red vinyl fabric embedded with flakes of gold glitter. I want to call it Naugahyde, but I’m not sure that’s right. Suzanne found the stools cheap at the Salvation Army over on Pitman Street. Here and there, the upholstery is marred by cigarette burns.

  “I thought you’d be back sooner.”

  “Like I said, all the fucking traffic,” she reminds me, then produces a manila folder from her pea-green laptop bag. She lays the folder on the countertop and taps it twice with her right index finger.

  “So, what’d you find out!” I ask, and Suzanne taps the folder a third time, and answers me with a question of her own.

  “Ever heard of the Church of Starry Wisdom?”

  “Wasn’t that one of Aleister Crowley’s little clubs?” I ask, and watch the blank television screen.

  “No, it isn’t. Or wasn’t. Whichever.” I hear her open the folder, but I don’t turn around. “This was way before Crowley’s time. Near as anyone can tell, the order was founded by an egyptologist and occultist named Enoch Bowen, sometime around 1844. At least, in May of that year he came back from a dig on the east bank of the Nile, at a site near Thebes. The following July, he bought an abandoned Free-Will Baptist sanctuary on Fedenl Hill, and started the Church of Starry Wisdom.”

  “Never heard of it,” I tell her.

  “Neither had I. But that’s not too surprising. Whatever Bowen and his followers were up to, seems it didn’t sit too well with the locals. By December 1844, ministers in Providence were denouncing the Starry Wisdom. Four years later, there were rumors of blood sacrifices, devil worship, that kind of thing. Various sordid scandals and hostilities ensued. Though by 1863, there appear to have been at least two hundred people in Bowen’s congregation. And sometime in 1876, Thomas Doyle, who was the mayor of Providence at the time, stepped in and the church was summarily shut down. After that, Professor Bowen and most of his followers left Providence, it seems. There are rumors of the Starry Wisdom cult reemerging in other places. First in Chicago, then, near the end of the 19th Century, somewhere in Yorkshire.”

  The way she’s talking, Suzanne reminds me of someone reading a book report to her high-school classmates.

  “Colorful story,” I say, and take another sip of the lukewarm Scotch. “But what’s any of this got to do with your box and its bauble?”

  “Just about everything,” Suzanne replies, her tone growing exasperated, and I glance at her over my shoulder. She looks tired, tired but excited. Jittery. On edge. She forces a smile for me, and continues.

  “Look, now you’re being dense on purpose,” she says. “When Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844, he brought back an artifact he discovered during an excavation there. A carving or stone or cartouche. This artifact, which is only ev
er referred to as ‘the Shining Trapezohedron,’ was supposed to be some sort of magical gateway. Bowen and his cohorts though they could use it to talk to ancient Egyptian gods, or maybe gods older than the Egyptians. Babylonian. Sumerian. I don’t know That part’s not clear, exactly who or what they were worshipping. But the artifact was used to summon them. In return for blood offerings and profane sexual rites—the usual crap—the Starry Wisdom cult believed these gods would offer up all the hidden secrets of the universe.”

  I turn back towards the television, and consider switching it on again.

  “You’re not believing a word of this, are you?” she asks.

  “Not especially,” I reply.

  “It isn’t like I’m making it up. I have photocopies of contemporary newspaper accounts—”

  “I didn’t say I think you’re making it up. That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s sure what it sounded like,” Suzanne sighs, and god, I hate it when she sulks. I finish the Scotch, and set the empty glass on the floor beside the futon.

  “So, you’re saying the thing in your peculiar yellow box, that it’s Bowen’s Shining Trapezohedron?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “But wouldn’t the cultists have hauled their holy of holies away with them when they fled Providence?”

  “If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m going to stop right now, okay?”

  I close my eyes. I’m beginning to get a headache, that dull, faint throb winding itself up tight and jagged somewhere directly behind my eyes.

  “I have to be at work in half an hour,” I say. “I traded shifts with that new guy. The restaurant will be packed wall to wall tonight, and I’m not looking forward to it, that’s all. I’m not trying to be a bitch. It just seems strange, that these Starry Wisdom fruitcakes wouldn’t have taken their sacred relic with them when they left.”