Then he spoke, and his voice was lilting, and without steel. “At the edge of dreams,” he mused, “there you are. Poppet in her lion’s mane of hair.” He lifted his left hand and reached out to her and touched her hair, a light, mothlike touch.
She would die if she left.
She reached for him. She slid her arms around his neck and pressed her face against the stiff fabric of his coat. He smelled of the river and the Above, but beneath these odors was a cloying, meaty smell. Death, she thought, and rebirth. She drew back and put her hands to either side of his face and worked her fingers through the edges of the bandages he wore.
He stiffened at once. “Don’t,” he said. His voice was ancient and as cold as a blade.
The sound of it stopped her. Her heart was racing. She felt she was full of darkness and light in equal parts. “I want to see.”
“No.”
“Please.”
He did not stop her, but neither did he aid her in his unmasking.
The Doctor was as horrible as she had expected. Each peeled inch revealed another layer of raw red trauma that hurt just to look upon. She could not imagine how he lived, or what instrument had been used to scale the skin from his face, but it had been done crudely, with a weapon blunt enough to gouge meat and knick bone. He was…and yet he was not.
She had been lucky. The man who had cut her had loved her, after a fashion. He had not stabbed into her face with such sad malice. She put the palms of her hands on the naked, glistening red meat of the Doctor’s face. It immediately bled into her skin, a wound that forever wept.
It wasn’t human.
He really is the devil, she thought.
Reaching, she kissed him softly.
He tasted of neverending metallic pain. She moved closer, until their clothing hissed together. She wanted to take it from him, this pain, even if only a moment of it, and hold it inside, like a flame within the glass of an oil lamp. But the rough, severe suit of darkness separated them.
Slowly she began unbuttoning his coat.
“You’re a child,” he said. His voice was sweet without the bandages, untainted.
“No, I’m not.” Louise kissed him again. She kissed his mouth until his mouth changed, softened, accepted hers. She touched his hair, thick and rough and uncut at the collar. It had been golden once, the hair of a prince in a fairytale. Now it was dusty grey like old daylight, the color of blond kept too long in the dark. She buried her face in his throat, his unmarked flesh there scented by libraries and comforting old attics full of half-remembered treasures, old times, simpler times, that belonged in tintypes and cameos.
He made a groaning noise in the back of his throat.
She drew back and lifted off her nightdress like an ill-fitting skin, then lay back on the pillows, watching him watch her.
“Don’t seduce me,” he said. His voice was cracked and weary with age.
“I love you,” she said.
“I fascinate you.”
She held his unflinching gaze. “I want to be with you forever, Doctor.”
A bitter smile pulled the bleeding meat of his lips apart. “My Daisy. My Juliette. My Guinevere?”
“Yes,” she hissed, showing her teeth.
He leaned forward, his hands to either side of her, and kissed her throat. She thought it must pain him, each shuddering touch of skin on non-skin, yet he showed no discomfort. Perhaps, given time, she too would be like this, all cold iron and tempered steel, unbreakable, painless. She gasped as his kiss inched slowly downward over her reconstructed body.
Desire saturated her. Blood beaded and streaked her whiteness of flesh from the angry red wound of his face. She did not mind it. His lips painted her breasts, her belly, the soft, childish down between her legs. And when he finally touched her at her core she shuddered violently, as if in pain.
“Please,” she said. “Please, Doctor. I love you.”
He was against her, as hard and deadly as the night or some weapon. His absence of a face loomed inches above her. She turned her head away so as not to see.
“Look at me,” he said. His voice was sharp, like a slap.
She looked. His blood wept onto her face like teardrops.
“Will you think of princes, Poppet?” he asked, his voice suddenly angry. “Knights? Lancelot?”
“I don’t want princes,” she told him, moving with him. Her voice sounded raw, as if she’d been screaming for hours. “I want you.”
He pushed her roughly into the soft flesh of the bedclothes and took her there. The root of his passion cut like a blade within her. She did not mind the pain. He kissed her harshly, sucking her tongue deep into his mouth as he moved her, moved inside her, her pain building ever upward like the ruins of the old church that she had visited Above, ancient and pale and reaching high toward a god that had forsaken them all.
4
She lay inside his embrace for a long time afterward, his face in her hair, his arms clinging to her ribs. She wanted him. She wanted to touch him constantly. She was sore with want, with yearning. But, for now, he slept like death.
So she made do with examining his pocket watch. It was beyond an antique, scalloped and engraved with strange symbols and Latin and Greek words of wisdom. Inside there was a myriad of arms and configurations. The underside of the clamshell held a scratchy, yellowing picture of a young woman in dark, high-necked attire. She was almost supernaturally beautiful, flawless, like a white lily in ringlets of black hair. Louise thought of spindly actresses from gossamer silent film.
She felt a splinter of annoyance. Was this the Doctor’s dead wife, or a long-lost betrothed, cruelly taken by fate, like in his books?
“She was Lizabeth. My partner,” he said in the shivering cup of her ear. “And my maker. An amazing scientist. Mata Hari with eyes of coal.”
Louise stiffened at the devout sound of his voice.
“She wasn’t mine,” he explained. “We were perfect friends, siblings in science. But Lizabeth was not taken with men. You understand.”
The tension inched away. Louise felt very foolish, jealous of the dead. “She’s gorgeous. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You should have made me like her.”
“I told you, Poppet. I remade you in my image.”
She turned deftly on the bed so that she was lying beneath and he atop, his arm pinning her arms to the pillow above her head. His face did not disturb her now—if, indeed, it ever had.
“How?” she said. “How can you live?”
“The same as you, Poppet. The Elixir preserves us both.”
“The Fountain of Life,” she said. She touched his impervious white flesh under the open shirt and solitaire. He had a good body, not frail or weak like the bodies of so many academics. It was the body of a man just blossoming into mid-life, hard and wise. But he was much older, she knew.
She had read about the Elixir in his hand-written journals in the desk of the library, but at the time she had thought he was writing literature. In the journals he and his partner, the beautiful, enigmatic “L”—Lizabeth, presumably—ran a private practice for the lower class in the London borough of Whitechapel. The city was described nothing like the Jack the Ripper movies Louise had seen. There was no fog, no romance, just rain, endless waste, despair, and deathless poverty.
Having both grown up under similar conditions, the Doctor and Lizabeth were determined to discover a formula to defeat tissue rejection and overcome blood type, which had only just begun to be studied. Given time, they might be able to eradicate syphilis and other popular social diseases. Limbs and organs could be repaired, or even replaced, under the right circumstance. Blood would not need to be typed at all—it could be swapped indiscriminately between persons. That was their dream.
To that end, they had developed the Elixir, a formula they had stumbled upon by mixing a number of mundane chemicals in specific quantities, though the Doctor’s notes did not specify the ingredients. It preserved any living creature exactly as it was
in its present state, seizing its cells up ad perpetuam and disallowing the progression of disease, aging, or tissue rejection. They felt it was a good find, potentially beneficial to mankind. They began their experiments on insects at first, then rats. Then, as success followed success, they moved their way up the evolutionary ladder until they were ready for the ultimate test.
But only a few days before the Doctor and Lizabeth were prepared to treat an ailing prostitute with the Elixir, something happened. The narrative became erratic, then writing ceased altogether in the journal.
She touched the Doctor’s face with just the tips of her fingers. He did not flinch. “What happened to Lizabeth? And to you?”
He considered her request. She was afraid he did not trust her enough to reveal the rest of the story. But finally he spoke, and his voice was breathy, with none of its former steel.
Shortly before the experiment with the prostitute, he said, their dream came to an end. A police captain by the name of Pymm was alerted to their activity by one of the “sack-em-up” men that they employed to steal corpses from fresh graves so that they might study human anatomy in more detail. Professional grave robbers were untrustworthy by nature, and most had criminal records and were not fond of police. But in this case, a grave robber had fallen in love with Lizabeth, and when she did not return his affections, he turned the two of them into the police.
The lab was raided by Pymm’s men, and the Doctor and Lizabeth arrested. Grave-robbing was a serious charge in those days, and they found themselves facing the gallows. And it all might have ended there and then, and ended grimly enough, but Captain Pymm, like so many other men, fell under the charms of Lizabeth’s beauty. Once alone with her, he forced himself on her.
Lizabeth had long proclaimed herself the equal of any man. And she was in matters of science and academics. But her grandmother had been from the Far East, a former Geisha, and Lizabeth was delicate, frail. She had suffered consumption in her youth. She was unable to fight off Pymm’s advances.
But Pymm, whose mind loved beautiful women but whose body did not respond to them at all, became enraged when his rutting with Lizabeth didn’t culminate in anything. He blamed Lizabeth, of course. He was like a feral dog, said the Doctor. He beat at Lizabeth’s face again and again, smashing it like a ripe fruit. Finally, the Doctor, who was being held in an adjoining cell, managed to wrest Pymm back against the bars. This being Whitechapel, the Doctor kept a scalpel hidden inside the lining of his coat sleeve for protection. With it he cut Pymm’s face and struck out one of his eyes.
Pymm, a direly ugly man to begin with, went into a bloodthirsty frenzy. With several of his men holding the Doctor down, he used that same scalpel to carve the skin from the Doctor’s face one slow inch at a time, crudely, the blade growing duller with each strike. Finally, he drove the blade deep into the Doctor’s liver. The Doctor began bleeding out black. Pymm and his men, frantic with horror at what they had done, fled the scene. In the confusion, Lizabeth was able to lead the Doctor outside to a coach.
Later, in Lizabeth’s underground laboratory beneath the London streets, the Doctor himself became the subject of their first human experiment. Lizabeth fixed his terrible internal injuries as best she could, but there was nothing she could do about his face. He needed a blood transfusion immediately, and she and the Doctor were not the same type. Had she waited to infuse him with the Elixir, he would have died from loss of blood.
So it was done. And the Doctor was made ad perpetuam on that day. And on every day that followed.
5
“And me?” Louise said when he had finished his story. She wondered what part she played in his drama.
“And you,” he answered, his disarray of stiff fabrics rubbing deliciously against her nakedness as he bent over her, to kiss her sweetly and bitterly, “are like me now.”
NOW
1
Hade’s Gate teetered at the very edge of the Bronx, near the waterfront, a sunken brownstone with a skin of arcane graffiti, a garish red door, and a raw-knuckled doorman named Odin. Odin distrusted men, but liked women. He had been married for thirty happy years and had three daughters.
He thought he knew the girl who looked like a black-haired lioness from somewhere, but he couldn’t recall where exactly. She was big, legs that went for miles, and she moved like an athlete. She wore a witchy micro-dress with bell sleeves and polished scarab-black boots. Her black hair cloaked her to the base of the spine. Had she had a broom or a pumpkin she would have been perfect. As he took her money and stamped her hand he glanced at her pale leonine face and long cattish lashes. She was beautiful, yet strangely guileless and primal, which only added to her charms.
Only after she had been swallowed into the room of liquor, smoke and catcalls did he remember Louise, sweet Louise, whom he called Cheese Louise, and who always smiled like a little girl at his joke. She had gone on to better things, he hoped, things well beyond this rattrap. He hadn’t seen her since that night so many weeks ago, the night she danced like she was exorcising spirits, then left with that geek Tim.
Better she was gone, he thought. Yet a part of him ached for her, as he might his eldest daughter.
2
Nicholas Lazlo, the illegal Romanian-immigrant-owner of Hade’s Gate, noticed the girl in black almost at once. She was leaning against the bar, her endless legs crossed girlishly, a whiskey sour on the bar in front of her. She stirred the cherries around with a straw. The first thought that hit Lazlo was, Louise is back. Luscious Lou! His barkeep, Tim, always put two extra cherries in Louise’s whiskey sours.
Lazlo missed Lou. Girls came and went in this joint all the time, but Lou was one of a kind, a born dancer the likes of which Lazlo had never seen except in some of the secluded gypsy shantytowns outside Bucharest, the girls with handmade tambourines and broom skirts who danced like they were calling spirits. Louise had danced just as wildly on the stage. She had given Lazlo a steady stream of patrons, obsessed fans and stalkers.
In three strides he was there. But when Lazlo reached the bar he immediately realized his mistake. This was a different girl whose lank, leggy frame only reminded him of Lou. He felt a dull stab of disappointment, followed by a longer, more invasive incision in his brain and groin that he could only conclude was primal, red lust. Unlike Lou, and her almost childish innocence, this girl was sex—sex walking in a pair of platform boots.
“Hello, beautiful girl,” Lazlo said, leaning against the bar. He gave her a fatherly, concerned smile. “What is your name?”
She turned to look at him.
The girl was striking rather than pretty. Her eyes were endless, like something one might fall into and drown—and oddly mismatched, which only made him want her more. When he was thirteen, Lazlo had lived with a second cousin with just such eyes. Over a number of dull, sweating summers they had fucked frequently in a shed just outside the house.
The girl blinked slowly, like a lizard. “Lizabeth.” Her voice was a course, simmering voce sotto.
“Liz, then. This your first time, babe?” Lazlo was very proud of his fabricated Brooklyn accent.
Liz looked toward the stage where several of Lazlo’s girls were shimmying around a small copse of steel stripper poles. “I’m looking for work.”
“You dance?”
“Yes,” Liz said. Her eyes locked on his as she plucked a cherry from her drink and sucked it slowly past her fingers like a piece of candy.
Lazlo felt most of his internal organs turn over. The human part of his mind whispered a faint warning, that this girl was simply too good to be true, but the animal part was already taking over. His leather jeans felt very tight.
“Do you think I could do that someday?” Liz asked, referring to a girl who was on her knees on the catwalk, shaking her ass to a techno-remix of a popular Rob Zombie tune and skinning snakelike out of her costume.
“I think beautiful girl can do whatever she wants,” Lazlo answered with a breathless smile. “Why not see what th
e other girls are doing? And later we see if you have ‘what it takes?’”
“Yes,” answered the girl in a sibilant whisper. Again she blinked in that slow, hypnotic way.
Later, after Lazlo had closed the club, Liz whipped seamlessly up and down the stripper poles. She even supplemented her silvery modern dance moves with a shocking assortment of on point and arabesque gestures that made her seem to float on the bridge of Billy Idol music snarling out of the speakers above.
Lazlo thought of the fleet-footed strigoi of his homeland. Spirits clothed in human flesh, luring men into their pale, deathless embraces. “Eyes Without a Face” would forever remind him of Lizabeth, he decided.
This girl. She was Swan Lake and rock and roll all tied up in one delicious, jewel-lipped, long-legged package. Definitely a keeper.
The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler Page 5