He knelt and pulled back the bolt of his weapon, releasing the meager remains of its ammo belt. As he fed in a fresh one, a window nearby slid open. Bethany caught the glint of a rifle from behind the curtains, but a quick pull of her weapon’s trigger blew out the back of the man’s skull before he could draw a bead on Ardan.
Ardan thanked her as he chambered the first round of a new belt.
Weapon reloaded, he leapt from car to car until he reached one which was yet relatively intact. Without pausing, he heaved the main door open. A group of dazed House Jericho soldiers, along with more than a few civilian passengers, greeted him with hands raised in surrender.
Bethany leveled her repeater rifle at them. “Where is Lady Gretel?” she demanded.
No one responded. Ardan fired off a few rounds and echoed her demand.
“Where is she?”
A woman in a torn petticoat, her sunhat still somehow perched upon her head, pointed with a trembling hand toward the front of the train. Ardan thanked her, then held down the trigger until the compartment was drenched with gore.
Bethany followed close behind Ardan as he clambered along the length of the train. Gunfire thundered from the ridgeline as the Death Clan warriors who had remained there cut down anyone trying to stumble away from the crash; Bethany winced when she heard a woman scream as a bullet punched through her abdomen. But she gritted her teeth, remembered her son, and kept running.
Ardan paused at each relatively intact compartment he came across. He opened each in turn and whenever he found one occupied, he discharged his weapon until the screaming stopped. Upon reaching the front of the train, he leapt atop the coal car. Bethany saw his ears shoot up.
“There!” he pointed.
Bethany could just make out a group of House Jericho soldiers helping a white-armored figure, who ran unevenly as though carrying a burden, flee up a nearby slope. She recognized Lady Gretel instantly. Ardan had planted his feet, pulled back the bolt on his weapon and lined up the group in his crosshairs. Bethany realized what he was doing and shouted, “No!”
He growled in irritation, but upon seeing the look on her face, he nodded, slung his weapon across his shoulders, and charged up the hillside. The House Jericho soldiers tried to intercept him with a fusillade from their repeater rifles, but Ardan utilized all four of his limbs for locomotion and fell upon them with such swiftness that not a single bullet found its mark.
Bethany caught up with him just as he’d finished ripping the last soldier’s throat out with his claws. Ardan caught the man by the tunic before he fell, holding him up and looking into his eyes. Arterial blood gushed over Ardan’s forearm in thick rills and he bared his fangs, laughing with ecstasy as the man gurgled and sobbed. Bethany caught sight of a ring on one of the man’s fingers; she realized he was Lady Gretel’s husband just as Ardan let him slip to the ground like a broken doll.
Lady Gretel stumbled backward up the slope, her white armor spattered with blood and soot. She tugged at the holster upon her hip, trying desperately to free her revolver.
Bethany leveled her rifle. “Don’t,” she said.
Bethany could see now what had so hindered her: in her arms she bore the kicking, crying, screaming form of her three year old daughter.
“Let go of her,” Bethany ordered. Lady Gretel pleaded for mercy, but Bethany only drew back the hammer of her weapon. “Put her down!”
Once set on the ground, the little girl clutched hysterically at her mother’s leg. Tears streamed down her face and snot dribbled from her nose. She wore a little frocked dress, the satin still shiny and new where the explosion and escape had not damaged it. It must have been a gift given to her specifically for this trip. Bethany could imagine her twirling and curtseying in front of her mother at the train station, showing off her pretty new clothes.
Bethany’s heart hammered in her chest. Sweat beaded on her brow. Behind her, the other Death Clans warriors gathered. Above, a conspiracy of ravens wheeled slowly against an increasingly black sky. From all around came the tortured moans of the dying. In shaky hands, the barrel of her repeater rifle dipped ever so slightly.
“Kill them.”
Ardan unslung his weapon, but did not aim it. “No,” he said. “This part has to be yours.”
A cold wind swept up the hillside, carrying with it the stench of blood and charred flesh. Lady Gretel petted her daughter’s head, trying to calm her whilst trying equally hard to remain resolute. In her rifle’s iron sights, Bethany lined up Lady Gretel’s throat.
“Just spare my daughter,” Lady Gretel begged.
Bethany’s eyes burned and her hands trembled. She wanted her vengeance. But the girl’s little hands looked so much like those of her son—and the mask of horror Lady Gretel wore looked so much like the one Bethany wore when she realized her son would be stillborn. Her finger tightened around the trigger, but she just couldn’t pull it.
The sun plunged below the horizon, cutting the mountains into silhouettes. Against the gathering nightfall, their peaks and escarpments took on the resemblance of titanic spires and battlements—like the architecture of a cyclopean, black castle.
Bethany suddenly felt a pang in her abdomen. She lowered her rifle. “Bind them,” she told Ardan.
“What?” he snarled. “Kill them and be done with it!”
“I’m not going to kill them,” Bethany said.
She looked at Ardan, looked at the fur and feathers running down the back of his neck—looked at the twin ridges formed with the aid of her son’s ashes. A beatific smile fell softly upon her face.
“I’m going to give them to the High Priest.”
She laid a palm on her stomach, just below her navel. Humans and Ardan’s kind were not supposed to be able to produce offspring, but she could already feel the life growing within her. The High Priest had planned this all along. She realized that now. Lady Gretel and her daughter would be the final two individuals He needed to complete His harem—and she was going to, at last, give birth to a child.
C. Deskin Rink is a human organism. His work has appeared in the anthologies Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, Torn Realities and at Pseudopod.org. Follow him at ankorsabat.blogspot.com.
(FOR THE LATEST UP-TO-DATE INFO, CLICK HERE)
The skinny boy tapped seven digits into his cell. He listened distractedly while the other end of the connection rang.
“Hello?”
“No names, okay? Someone might be listening. Beauty or life?”
“Wow! I know what you chose. Did you really do it?” Jaclyn’s voice jittered with almost as much pleasure as William felt.
“Somebody had to,” he said, rejoicing. Balancing the phone against his jawbone, William kissed his fingertips and stroked them along the whorls of the antique wooden frame.
The front of the beach house was almost all windows and flooded with sunlight, so he’d uncovered the felt wrappings and hung the painting in the darkened sitting room. Its effects were far greater than the rumors Jaclyn had heard. William would’ve sworn the painting made every wall move farther away. The painting made the entire world move farther away.
“I’m impressed that you’d do it for me.”
“You fucking should be. It’s more impressive in person. Don’t come over.”
“I don’t know where you are.”
William poked his tongue through his teeth, felt his lips curl to a smile. “Perfect.”
Of course she was worthy of seeing it, but not yet. She was the one who repeated the tales of the enchanted oils, that the painting could reveal splendor beyond dreams. It was unbelievable that the artwork hadn’t been on display. Instead, it had been wrapped up in a musty corner in a rich estate’s basement. He hung up on Jaclyn, stared at the canvas, and masturbated carefully.
Later, William walked in a small circle, focusing on the barren off-white walls and feeling the breeze blow in through a cracked kitchen window. He lifted his gaze and fixed his attention back on the masterpiece. It devastated anything he’d ev
er gleaned from brushstrokes. His hands quivered, and he laughed for a moment before going to the kitchen. The refrigerator contained nothing but a soft plum, which he grabbed. Then he unplugged the machine, whispering goodnight to that goddamn hum. But it was too late . . . the hum was already gone.
Yards away from the painting, he bit through the fruit’s skin and felt its juice dribble from his chin to his hands, then down his bare chest. He shivered, dropped the plum, and collapsed to the floor.
William dreamt of a blood-red ladder that jutted into the sky. Climbing upward, he realized that the rungs and rails were made of gristle and flesh. His eyelids flipped open with a start, but he was still asleep, dreaming of the painting as it floated just above the white wisps of clouds.
It was dark. William tasted salt in the air, heard the night surf, and enjoyed the growling hunger in his stomach. He didn’t want to go anywhere.
Blades of morning rays reached in through the kitchen, but the shades in the sitting room were still pulled tight. William sat up, feeling stiff. He rubbed grit from his eyes and looked at the painting. The artwork was exquisite.
A partially eaten plum was resting by the fireplace, coated with ash. William spat on it, trying to clean it off. He was hungry but didn’t want to eat.
He found his phone near the front door, but had forgotten being there with it. He called Jaclyn and got her voicemail.
“The rush of the new . . . the joy of self-possession . . . every inch is entirely ecstatic . . . I sense pulsations, a varying magnitude . . . none of it makes sense . . . that’s its . . .” William wasn’t sure if his message cut off or if he forgot he was talking and just set the phone down.
A brown vial of cocaine was in the back of the freezer. The refrigerator was unplugged, but it didn’t matter—there wasn’t any food in it. William wasn’t much of an eater, even before, but felt the skinny boy inside him should try. He found a cube of beef bouillon in a drawer, chewed it for a moment, then spat it out onto the linoleum. The lump of brown muck looked as salty and grainy as it had tasted.
Coming to, William’s tongue felt thick with nasal drip and soot. Probing an incisor with his tongue, the coarse tang made him cough. It was night again. William wanted to wake up.
Turning on every light in the beach house didn’t help. He went to the bathroom and splashed bleach all over his body, rubbing the corrosive liquid in with a stained towel. He barely felt it. Frustrated, William yanked a fluorescent light bulb from its fixture and smashed it on the porcelain sink. He took the jagged edge of one end and thrust it into his left arm like a claw. In the bathroom mirror, William smiled as he watched the skinny boy’s nerve endings scream.
Feeling himself being attacked, he shuddered and became alert.
“How are you here?” he stammered, as Jaclyn’s stiletto heel jabbed into him a third time.
“You called me. Have you killed yourself?”
“No.” William looked at the angry red swirls in his arm, the pocks in the skin of Jaclyn’s face, her wilted eyes. He gagged as he realized how flawed it all was.
He tasted blood drooling from his mouth, and turned his head, surprised to see a thread of thick, violet saliva dangling from his bottom lip. William noticed that the pit of a plum was resting amidst flakes of frosted glass, splashes of blood, and white powder.
“You’re naked. So skinny. Emaciated.” Jaclyn grimaced as she took in how much damage he’d done to himself.
“I had to be thin to sneak in through the window and get it. Come. Have you seen it?” A burning string of pain knitted along his left side. His breathing hitched. Barely able to lift himself up off the bathroom tile, William felt his penis growing erect again.
Jaclyn tried to shrug. She was also injured, bleeding from a slash that ran down her back. William decided she’d already seen the painting.
She pointed to the powder scattered on the bathroom counter and floor. “Is that blow?”
Standing up increased the blood coming from William’s arm—but he was vaguely comforted by the idea that his breathing was improving.
“Maybe from inside the bulb tube. There was some. Somewhere. Once. How did you know where to find it?”
“When you steal, you hear things.”
William wobbled into the sitting room and crouched against the back wall, far from the artwork. His dick started pulsing in rhythm with the throb of his wounds. Jaclyn was already there, her pants half off. She looked like she was in pain, yet somehow comfortable. The blood smeared along the wall next to him was probably his, but might have been hers . . . he wondered if they took turns. William watched her nostrils flare outward and back. Her mouth released a loud whimper as she pulled at her genitals. She was quiet for a moment.
“Fresh flowers . . . in a glazed vase . . . dying from a poison touch. The touch matters, even when no one believes.” Her voice had acquired a husky quality that William thought of as a tireless bitterness. The entire spectacle was the crescendo for their private ceremony. Maybe a timeless bitterness instead. Everything was exhausted. Not knowing what to expect, he hadn’t dreamed anything could be as divine as this moment.
“Better than you said. That’s what we wanted . . . its magnificence.”
William watched Jaclyn’s eyes change from ice blue to woolly gray. He climbed atop her body and began to ram himself into her. She didn’t make a sound.
Waking again, despite his bleach burns and gashes, William jerked off. He stared at the painting until the borders of his vision dripped. A crimson pool was spreading along the planks of the wooden floor. His eyes began to dry out and feel wrinkled. Too drained to move, William wished he could crawl to the canvas to touch or lick its oils. Peering deeply into the century-old browns and greens of the vase and dying flowers, he finally saw a hint of motion. A kind and smiling face emerged in chartreuse, vermilion, and cadmium blue. A hand reached out and offered funereal flowers. William knew he’d never move again, and hoped it would be weeks before he bled to death or starved.
Geoffrey H. Goodwin does not know.
(FOR THE LATEST UP-TO-DATE INFO, CLICK HERE)
Dad, what’s foie gras?”
It had been a long night, lost in blurring hours of darkened motorway and streaming white lines. We had driven out of Cherbourg and headed south through the night towards Nantes, then further still past Bordeaux, only stopping to refuel or take toilet breaks. We were destined for Masseube, or rather a remote farmhouse with Masseube as its nearest point of significant civilization. We had planned to share the driving but sometime after midnight Kelly had fallen asleep and not come around again.
Until now, Joseph had slept most of the way too.
Near our destination, the roads narrowed and dipped in and out of valleys. On the edge of the horizon, the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees were silhouetted against the first hesitant shades of dawn. But even in the early hours, the air was warm here; and as rolling landscapes carpeted with endless rows of dying sunflowers steadily emerged from darkness, I began to realize just how secluded our holiday location would be. Every now and then the headlights picked out battered wooden signs with the words foie gras scrawled across them in painted letters.
There was no way I would have found this place without satellite navigation.
“Dad?”
I had been hoping Joseph would fall back to sleep, but there was no chance of that now. He was eleven and eager to begin our summer holiday. He had seen the pictures: the swimming pool, the snooker table, the ping pong set. And now, as morning light grew in strength, there was no way he would sleep again.
“You’re sure you want to know?” I asked. “It’s pretty horrible.”
This ignited interest, as I knew it would, and he craned his neck between the seats to hear the explanation.
“Foie gras means, fat liver—and you eat it. It’s actually made of duck’s liver.”
“Urgh.”
“Disgusting, hey? But it gets worse than that, you know why? Because of how they
make it. You want to know how they make it?”
Joseph smiled at me from between the seats and nodded slowly.
“Well, first they get the duck and they put it in a metal cage. But it’s not a normal cage. It’s a really small cage with a big hole at the top so the duck can stick its head out. But the cage isn’t just small—it’s so small that the duck can’t even move. In fact, the only thing it can do is move its head.”
“Why do they do that?”
“Well, if the duck can move it means it can exercise, like a duck is supposed to, right? But they don’t want that. They want the duck to stay exactly in the same position and get fat. And so they feed it and feed it and feed it every day through a tube down its neck, and in the end that makes its liver all fat and swollen up. And when it’s fat and swollen up enough, they kill the duck and make its liver into a nice pâté so they can eat it.”
“Who are they?”
“Tom, that’s enough.” Kelly was suddenly awake next to me. “That’s a horrible thing to tell a child. Absolutely horrible. What is wrong with you?”
“Look. I’m just telling him how it is. He’s old enough to hear these things now.”
“Yeah, Mum. I am old enough, you know.”
A long silence followed. I had inadvertently managed to do it again: pit the boys against the girls. But therein, as always, lay the problem—there was two of us, and only one of her.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Mum, have you ever eaten foie gras?”
“No, I have not.”
“Dad, have—”
“Wait. This is it.”
The sunflowers had given way to bare, unfarmed land, and the road narrowed to a small junction where a crumbling memorial rose from the dried earth like a Norse god silently watching over the landscape. Beyond this, the ruined chapel of Le Carde stood derelict amongst crooked headstones and rusting crucifixes. I recognized it all from the photographs. Our destination was less than a hundred meters from this place.
Darkness Ad Infinitum Page 8