by Jeffrey Ford
He reluctantly removed the sword. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his arms around her. They kissed more passionately than they had in the clearing. He ran his fingers through her hair as she clasped her hands behind his back and kissed his chest. He moved his hands down to her breasts and she reached for his prick. When their ardor was well inflamed, she pulled away from him, and then slowly leaning forward, whispered in his ear, “Do you want me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then, come in,” she said and, grabbing the corner of the blanket, threw it back for him.
For a moment, Ismet Toler wore the same look of terrible surprise that was fixed forever on the faces of his victims, for Lady Maltomass was, from the waist down, blood coral. He glimpsed the frozen crease between her legs and cried out.
Garone appeared suddenly at his side, shouting, “Treachery!” Toler turned toward his servant just as Mamresh, bearing a smile, appeared and pulled back the hood of his tulpa’s robe. The swordsman glimpsed his own face, with yellow eyes, in the instant before the thought form went out like a candle. He buckled inside from the sudden loss of Garone. Then, from out of the dark, he was punched in the face.
Toler came to on the floor, gasping as if he’d been underwater. Greppen was there, helping him off the floor. Once Toler had regained his footing and clarity, he turned back to the bed.
“Imagine,” said Lady Maltomass, “your organ of desire transformed into a fossil.”
Toler was speechless.
“Some years ago, my father took me to the market at Camiar. He’d been working on the translation of the spell upon your sword, and he’d heard that you frequented a seller there who dispensed drams of liquor. He wanted to present you with what he’d discovered from the ancients about the sword’s script. Just as we arrived at the market, a fight broke out between five swordsmen and yourself. You defeated them, but in the mêlée you struck a young woman with an errant thrust and she was turned to coral.”
“Impossible,” he shouted.
“You’re an arrogant fool, Ismet Toler. The young woman was me. My father brought me back here a statue, and prepared the five herbs from his research into an elixir. He poured it down my hard throat, and because it was made of only half the ingredients of the cure, only half of me returned.”
Greppen tapped Toler upon the hip and, when the swordsman looked down, handed him the Coral Heart.
“Now you face my tulpa,” said the Lady.
Toler heard Mamresh approaching and drew the sword, dropping the sheath upon the bed. He ducked and sidled across the floor, the weapon constantly moving. He turned suddenly and was struck twice in the face and once in the chest. He stumbled but didn’t go down. She moved on him again, but this time, he saw her vague outline and sliced at her torso. The blade passed right through her and she kicked him in the balls. He doubled over and went down again.
“Get up, snake,” called Lady Maltomass from the bed.
“Please rise, Ismet Toler,” said Greppen, now standing before him.
He lifted himself off the floor and resumed a defensive crouch. He kept the blade in motion, but his hands were shaking. Mamresh attacked. Her hard knuckles seemed to be everywhere at once. No matter how many times Toler swung the Coral Heart, it made no difference.
After another pass, Mamresh had him staggered and reeling from side to side. Blood was running from his nose and mouth.
“I’ve just given her leave to beat you to death,” said Lady Maltomass.
The vague outline of a muscled arm swept out of the air, and Toler slid beneath it, turned, and made the most exquisite cut to the ghostly figure’s spine. The blade didn’t even slow in its arc.
She closed his left eye and splintered his shin with a kick. Toler was on the verge of panic when he saw Greppen standing in the corner, tiny fists raised in the air, urging Mamresh to the kill. The tulpa came from the left this time. The swordsman had learned the sound of her breathing. Before she could strike, he tucked his head in and rolled into the corner where Greppen stood. He could hear her right behind him.
He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the toad man by the ankle. Then, as Toler rose, he lifted the blade and, with unerring precision, gave a deft slice to the councilor’s neck. He turned quickly, and Greppen’s blood sprayed forth in a great geyser. It washed over Mamresh, and she became visible to him as she threw a punch at his left eye. He moved gracefully to the side, tossing Greppen’s now coral body at her. It passed through her face, briefly blocking her view of him. Toler calmly sought a spot where the blood revealed his assassin and then lunged, sending the blade there.
Mamresh gasped, and her visible face contorted in terror as she crackled into blood coral. He turned back to the bed, and the Lady was still. He now could ascertain the color of her eyes, and they were a deep red. He’d made her mind coral in the act of defeating her tulpa. He dropped the sword and lay down beside her. Pulling her to him, he tried to kiss her, but her teeth were shut and a slow stream of drool issued from the corner of her mouth.
Toler discovered Nod gutted and decapitated in a heap upon the stable floor. After that, he spared no one, but worked his way down every hall and through the gardens, killing everything that moved. It was after midnight when he left the palace in the flying chair and disappeared into the western mountains.
People wondered what had happened to the Coral Heart. Some said he’d died of frostbite, some, of fever. Others believed he’d finally been careless and turned himself into a statue. Seven long years passed and the violence of the world had been diminished by half. Then, in the winter of the Year of Ice, a post rider galloped into Camiar and told the people that he’d seen a half-dozen bandits turned to coral on the road from Totenhas.
A Note About “The Coral Heart”
I got the idea for this story from reading a book about the sixteenth-century Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. You may know him from his portraits of people composed from different types of fruit or sea creatures or books. As if those paintings aren’t remarkable enough, he also worked in other forms—sculpture, jewelry, and the design of elaborate stage sets. One object of his creation was a sword with a handle made of red coral, the coral appearing like the major arteries of the heart. From the image of that decorative weapon (it could not be used in battle as the handle was too fragile) my story grew. The phenomenon of the “tulpa” or “thought form” is supposedly a real entity, which I first came across when reading about Alexandra David-Neel, a Belgian explorer and spiritualist who, in 1924, traveled through Tibet when nonnatives were forbidden there. She reports having conjured a tulpa in the form and character of Friar Tuck, whom she eventually had to kill due to the fact that it had taken on a life of its own.
The Double of My Double Is Not My Double
I saw my double at the mall a couple of weeks ago. I was sitting on a bench outside a clothing store. Lynn was inside, checking out the sales. My mind was pretty empty as I watched the intermittent trickle of shoppers on their way to something else. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a person sit down next to me. I turned and saw who it was and laughed. “Hey,” I said. “How’s business?”
He was dressed in a rumpled suit and tie and he looked tired. Sighing to catch his breath, he sat back. There was a weak smile on his face. “Double drill,” he said.
“Knowing me, I wouldn’t think there’d be that much to it,” I told him.
His eyes half-closed and he shook his head.
“You must be at it all day,” I said.
“And into the night,” he said. “On top of all of it, I’ve had to get a part-time job.”
“You’re moonlighting as my double?”
“I’m dipping things in chocolate at that old-fashioned candy store on Stokes Road. Four hours a day for folding cash. Remember a couple of meetings back after we started talking, I told you I was living in that giant house out by the wild-animal rescue, the last cul-de-sac before the road turns to dirt? The mortgage on
that place is crushing.”
“I thought you were living with like four or five other doubles, splitting the cost,” I said.
“Yeah, but my double salary isn’t cutting it. Dipping things in chocolate, though, pays extraordinarily well. I make a hundred dollars every four-hour session.”
“That’s pretty good. What do you dip?”
He leaned forward and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one, but I’d quit, and he looked slightly wounded by my refusal. When he sparked his big chrome lighter, I noticed the pale hue of his complexion, the beads of sweat, the slight shaking of his hands. There was a pervasive aroma of alcohol.
He took a drag and, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, said, “You name it, I’ll dip it. It started with fruit, and by the time they brought in the first steak, I knew it was gonna get out of hand. Finally, the old Swedish guy who runs the place took off his shoe and handed it to me. A chocolate loafer. After I fished it out and it dried, he and his wife laughed their asses off.”
“You don’t look well,” I told him. “You’ve put on weight and you’re pale. You look like the Pillsbury dough boy on a bender.” The right arm of his glasses was repaired with Scotch tape.
“Well,” he said. “This is what I’ve come to talk to you about.”
He was a wreck. I looked away. Nobody wants to see themselves tear up, watch their own bottom lip quiver.
“It seems I have a double,” he said, his voice cracking slightly.
A moment passed before I could process the news. “You’re a double and yet you have a double? How’s that work?”
“It’s rare,” he said, “but it happens. You know, as your double, I don’t bother you that often. I’ve not brought you any ill luck like in the legends. I’m just around and you see me maybe once or twice a year, we have a friendly chat, and I go on my way. The kind of double I have, though, is not benign, as I am to you; it’s an evil emanation.”
“Is your double also my double?” I asked.
“Not precisely. He’s not got our good looks. For the most part he exists as a cloud, a drifting smog. But he can take physical form for short periods of a few hours. A shape-shifter. Insidious. He’s always hovering, repeating what I say in a high-pitched voice, appearing to my friends and fucking them over, making them think it’s me. When I complain to him, he laughs and pinches my second chin. All night, he whispers paradoxical dreams into my ear, their riddles frustrations dipped in chocolate. He’s my double, but your psyche used me to birth him.”
“You’re losing me,” I said. “Are you saying I’m responsible?”
“Well, it’s your orbit that I’m trapped in. Everything issues from you. He’s been haunting me for the past six months. Can you think of some bleak or grim thought you might have had back half a year that could have sown the seed?”
“Grim thoughts?” I said. “I have a couple dozen a day.”
“He’s trying to supplant me as your double. If he takes my position, your ass’ll be in a sling. He’ll grind you down to powder.”
“What are we gonna do?” I asked.
“He goes by the name Fantasma-gris.”
“Spanish?”
“Yeah, it means Gray Ghost.”
“I don’t even know Spanish,” I said. “I did a couple years of it in high school. I can say meatball, count to ten, that’s it.”
“Somehow something about Fantasma-gris dribbled out of your mind. Just sit tight till I figure out a plan,” he said, resting his hand lightly on my forearm. He stood quickly. “Then I’ll be back in touch.”
“A plan for what?”
“To kill him.” He spun away then and lumbered off down the center of the mall. I watched him go and realized he was limping. I was wondering what was with his suit and tie. I hadn’t worn one in three years.
“Are you ready?” asked Lynn. She was standing before me, holding a big bag from the store she’d been in. I got up and put my arm around her shoulders as we headed off.
She said, “Let’s go get dinner somewhere.”
I agreed. We left the mall and went out into the parking lot. As we drove to the restaurant Lynn had decided on, I was preoccupied, thinking about Fantasma-gris. I wanted to tell her about it, but she’d made it clear years earlier that she didn’t want to hear any double talk. When I’d finally cornered my double downtown one day and spoken to him for the first time, I told Lynn about it.
“What do you mean, ‘a double’?” she’d said.
“A doppelgänger. My twin. It’s metaphysical, you know, like a spirit. I’ve been seeing him around for about a year now, and today, I went up to him and told him I knew what he was.”
She smiled and shook her head as I spoke, but at one point she stopped and squinted and said, “Are you serious?”
I nodded.
“Do you understand what you’re saying?” she’d asked.
“Yeah.”
“You better get to a shrink. Don’t think I’m heading toward retirement with a kook.” She’d walked over to where I sat and leaned down to put her arms around me. “You gotta get your shit together,” she said.
Lynn made me an appointment and I went to see this woman, Dr. Ivy, who asked me about the double. I told her everything I knew. Her office smelled of patchouli and there was low, moaning music piped in from somewhere. She was a very short, fairly good-looking woman with long dark hair and a faint scar on her right cheek. For some reason, I pictured her cutting herself on her own plum-painted thumbnail. Every time I spoke, she nodded and jotted things down on a pad. I was transfixed by the sight of an ivy tattoo on the wrist of her writing hand, and at the end of the session, she wrote me a scrip for some head pills.
I bought them and read the warnings. In print so tiny I had to use a magnifying glass to read, it said my throat could close up, I might get amnesia, bleed from my asshole, lose my hearing, develop a strange taste of rotten eggs in my mouth, or be drawn to reckless gambling. I took them for two days and felt like a walking sandbag. On the third morning, I flushed them down the bowl. I’d learned my lesson. I never went back to see Dr. Ivy, but then I never mentioned my double to Lynn again.
At the restaurant, I ordered ravioli and Lynn got a salad. We both had wine, me red, her white. The place was dark but our table had a red candle. We talked about the kids and then we talked about the cars. She told me what was going on at her job. We bitched about politics for ten minutes. All along, though, I wanted to tell her what the double had told me in the mall, but I knew I shouldn’t. Instead, I said to her, “I was thinking about Aruba today. That was a great vacation.”
She took my cue and started reminiscing about the blue water, the sun, the balcony in our room that opened onto a courtyard filled by the branches of an enormous tree with orange flowers and crawling with iguanas the size of house cats. I reminded her of our jeep journey to the desert side of the island and the stacked stone prayers that littered the shore. It was a great trip, and I took real pleasure in recalling it with her, but yes, I had an ulterior motive.
It was on that vacation that I first saw my double. While she spun out her descriptions of the Butterfly Pavilion, an attraction we’d visited, or the night we ate at a restaurant on the edge of a dock, ocean at our backs, party lights, a guy with a beat-up acoustic guitar playing “Sleepwalk,” I was, in that memory of Aruba, elsewhere, standing at midnight, after she’d fallen asleep, smoking a joint on the open second-floor landing of our building.
Beneath me was a lighted trail that cut through the tall bamboo. I was bone weary, and my eyes were half closed. We’d gone kayaking that day. I wondered how the kids were getting along without us but my thoughts were distracted by the strong breeze whipping the bamboo tops. I was just about to flick the roach away and ascend the concrete steps to my left when I saw someone pass by on the path.
The fellow was about six foot, a little stooped, thick in the chest and well overweight. He leaned into the wind, holding a floppy white beach hat to his head wi
th his left hand. With the next gust, his yellow Hawaiian shirt opened, the tails blowing behind him to reveal his gut. He turned his head suddenly and looked up at me for a moment before disappearing into the bamboo. The glasses, the big head, his dull look seemed familiar. I tried to place where I might have seen him before, but I was too tired.
The next day, we took a jeep over to the barren side of the island and visited an abandoned gold mine. There was a three-story busted and rusted concrete and tin structure built into the side of an enormous sand dune. The place was spooky inside and Lynn and I held hands as we went from room to room. There was nothing really to see but rotted furniture and rusted metal bed frames in a maze of rooms that led on to other tunnels and rooms. I started to feel claustrophobic, and said I’d had enough. She agreed.
As we made our way toward where we remembered the exit being, another party of sightseers passed by in a hallway to our left. An older gentleman with a cane and a white-haired woman following him. She nodded to us and smiled. Then a second later, the guy from the night path went by, whistling, the sound of his tune echoing through the rooms and back into the heart of the sand dune. I saw him for only an instant, but knew it was him and knew I recognized him from somewhere.
At least three more times, I caught sight of him in Aruba, and then in the last few days we were there, he seemed to have vanished. The next time I saw him was on the plane going home. Lynn and I had taken our seats, and he passed down the aisle toward the back. His presence surprised me. I sat up, and as he went by, he looked down, straight into my eyes. It wasn’t until after takeoff that I realized he was me.
I was petrified the whole flight home, thinking doppelgänger. Trapped with one in midair, no less. In Poe, in Hoffmann, in Stevenson, the double was always grim business. I didn’t even want to consider the dark foreboding of legends and folklore. But, for all my perspiration, we landed safely and that was that. I saw him briefly at the baggage terminal, walking away, carrying a battered blue suitcase. A few months went by before I caught sight of him in town one snowy afternoon.