In the end, I never took Josie anywhere. For a while, I tried to hold her when nightmares shivered beneath her skin, when her tattoos writhed in their own dreams. My touch made it worse.
The day I left, she sat on the hotel bed, head bowed. A red-glass heart from Murano lay cupped in her palm, brilliant as blood. Bubbles ran through its core. I touched it with one finger; the glass was warm from her skin.
“I don’t know why I have this,” she said.
Her eyes held hurt, raw as a wound. Whatever I’d taken from her, trying to guide her through the between, was something I could never replace. Some wounds never heal. I left. I didn’t ask her to forgive me.
Here and now, a ruby spotlight pins Josie—an American girl, singing Southern standards and bluesy jazz in a drowned and drowning city half-way across the world. Her song cuts knife-deep, touches bone. I can’t help remembering the last time we lay, cooling in each others’ sweat, windows open, listening to the crowds leaving the Teatro. The breeze raised goosebumps on her skin, skin the colour of Tuscan hills, of earth, of a time before the Risen Ones.
That was the last time salt tasted good.
Josie’s voice is sandstone, rubbed against my skin. It is coffee, scalding hot and poured into my lap. In the ruby spotlight and the green seeping from the edges of the world, she’s beautiful.
I sip my martini, slid without asking across the bar by the loyal bartender, Lorence. His skin is damp, his eyes as pained as the poor boy who served me in Harry’s Bar. No matter that it hurts him, he still labours to breathe with human lungs, shunning his gills.
Josie leaves the stage. Her dress swirls against legs encased in nylon, blooming roses. The skirt catches light in its folds, red on red, pooling blood. She wears a flower in her braided hair. Once upon a time, I may have given her a flower the same shade—a real one, not a silk monstrosity with hot-glue dew-drops clinging to its petals.
Her eyes meet mine, their moss-green accentuated by the underwater light. A smile touches her lips but not her gaze.
“Ara.” Josie brushes her lips against my cheek, making sure to catch the corner of my mouth.
She smells of powdered lily-of-the-valley, dusted heavy to hide the reek of fear. Someone very wealthy must have bought it for her. Scents like that are hard to come by.
Guilt spreads patterns of frost across the surface of my heart, but it doesn’t touch the core. Pain flickers in Josie’s eyes. I’ve forgotten; she hasn’t.
I tip my head towards Lorence; it’s the least I can do. Josie orders something as blood-red as her dress, but with far more kick.
“What are you doing here?” Josie asks.
Her fingernails are ragged, as if she’s been raking them across the walls in her sleep. A tendril of ink slips from beneath the strap of her dress, a questing tongue tasting the air. She shivers. The ink-shadow stains her eyes for a moment, too, turning them the colour of lightning-struck wood.
“I was lonely,” I say. It may be the most honest thing I’ve ever said; I don’t know.
“Oh?” Her eyes are green again, sparking mockery.
She lifts the long, black braid lying over my shoulder, running it through trembling hands.
“I wish I could do something for you.” The words fall, a numb rush over my lips.
Josie is the most breathtaking woman I’ve ever known. Why can’t I feel anything for her? I know what she meant to me, what she means to me, but I don’t feel it. Not anymore. Her skin flickers, the ink shivering across its surface and underneath. I mimic the motion unconsciously, my body responding to her hands on my hair.
“There’s nothing you can do.” She drops my braid, a soft slap against my leather.
Josie hes her drink and orders another, her mouth set in a hard line that reminds me of Madam Senator and the case I should be on. What am I doing here?
“There’s nothing I can do for you, either.” Josie steps back, eyes as hard as the line of her mouth.
She’s right. There’s nothing I can do except buy her drinks. And isn’t there a selfish hope that her inhibitions will drop and we’ll end up back in that decaying hotel room, listening to the remnants of humanity leave the Teatro while we fuck?
Once, in the space between midnight and dawn, in the half-dark—an unnatural glow belonging to caves and never aboveground—I tasted the nightmare-sweat slicking Josie’s skin. I traced the writhing lines of her tattoos with my tongue. She didn’t wake. That sweat wasn’t sweat—it tasted like the oil born of the rotting bones of prehistoric beasts, oozing beneath the skin of the world.
Josie’s next words send my pulse into the roof of my mouth. “Do you remember what you told me about your stepbrother and the night you got your scars?”
“No.” The word comes out hoarse, terrible. Josie’s smile is worse. I can’t remember if it’s a lie.
What did I tell her? What if I took her between, trying to make her forget?
Josie leans forward, her lips against my ear, her breath raising tiny hairs on my skin. Her voice is smoke, rough whiskey, shattered amber. “He called you his angel. They’re shaped like wings, your scars.”
When she draws back, I feel the absence of her breath.
“I don’t think you’re even human, anymore.” Her hips sway as she walks back to the stage.
God help me, I’m wet and trembling. I want to throw her over the bar and bury my head between her legs, nipping the soft flesh of her thighs till she bleeds. Maybe she’s right about me. Maybe I’m not human. Maybe I’m too much so.
Josie grips the microphone like she wants to throttle it. Her voice is steel wool, scouring flesh; her eyes are fixed on me.
The blood-and-seawater light fills my mouth with salt. The world rolls. Firelight flickers, throwing shadows against the thinness of my eyelids.
“The world is going to end.” A voice speaks against my ear.
“It’s already ending.” I smell wet leather, tangle my fingers through wheat-gold hair, and pull wine-stained lips against mine. Rain drums. Hay prickles bare skin. “So, fuck me,”
I bite down hard, yank fabric roughly over hips; a body pushes into mine. A cry of pleasure and pain, and after, the world burns.
Josie’s voice wails. Her smile is blade-edged, her tattoos unmistakable, now. They slither across her shoulders, beneath the neckline of her dress, chasing the ghost of my fingertips across her skin. Josie tips her head back, throat working. The song becomes a scream, her body shuddering, eyes rolling white between agony and ecstasy.
The bar squirms in murky half-light. Tentacles unfold. They undulate across the walls, wrap my arms, lift my hair. I drift in the green deep and they caress my bones.
I stagger for the door, retch on fire-scored pavement. Chill air slaps my face; I shift without meaning to. The threads binding past to present catch me, hurl me forward in time. My bones nearly shatter, filled with desire to part company with my flesh. I want to scatter wide enough that I don’t have to remember anything ever again.
In another reality, following another skein of time, I follow Josie back to her tiny, hot apartment, overlooking S. Francesco della Vigna. We listen to distant water lap. We fuck. Her tattoos writhe; she whimpers with pleasure and fear. I taste her while she screams. She tells my future in her sleep. I say goodbye. And she forgives me this time.
I brace myself against a wall, trembling. Damp, heavy breezes push air through the narrow, winding streets. My skin cold-sweats with borrowed dew. Where am I? When?
I walk, boots hushing over time-worn stone. I sympathize with Marco. I wonder why I’m hunting him. The Senator’s envelope presses against my chest. I want to get this case over with and pretend there’s a place I can go to that will feel like home.
Blonde hair, the smell of leather in the rain. I survived; he didn’t. Fire scored my back with a thousand whips, tracing the shape of wings.
I walk along the waterfront, fighting memories that insist on surfacing, no matter how many times I try to give them away. I’ve b
egged the dark spaces teeming with star-ripe tentacles to take them away, but they never do. There are no refunds on the price of survival, once it’s paid.
I pass a nightclub where a church used to stand. Tentacles—half-seen—lash the night. Shadows obscure the stars and they are just right. The club-beat is a heart-sound, a pulse-thump. The building sways. It shivers. Pigeons weep and mourn in cages embedded in walls of slick, trembling flesh. Overhead, gulls still scream their laughter, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
I know where I’m going now. Farther down the wharf, where, once upon a time, goods used to be delivered in rusting, corrugated containers, is the man I need to see.
Vincenzo sits at the end of a pier jutting out into the water. The piles are ghosts against the lapping dark. Each weed-slicked piece of wood is topped with a creature with too many arms, suckers gripping rotten wood. They sing.
The eerie-sweet sound licks my spine, too much like the timbre of Josie’s voice. But instead of smoky-hot, the tentacles sing cold. How can things without mouths sing?
Their voices—if they can be called that—are vast, reaching distances but also reminiscent of the deeps, of cavern-glow and waving fronds. Their tears—should they ever cry—would taste of copper, iron, sulfur, and flame.
Vincenzo cocks his head. He hears me coming, but he doesn’t pause. His arm moves, his brush stroke jerky, involuntary.
“Ara.” He doesn’t turn.
The scant, pulsing light falling from behind me illuminates the rotting pier. The dark water shimmers, bioluminescence touching the waves but never what lies beneath. It shows Vincenzo’s face and the gaping spaces where his eyes are not.
I was the one who found him. The bathroom tiles—staggered white and black—slick with blood. Vincenzo’s head rested against the edge of a claw-footed tub. He wept.
Rather—his body shook with sobs and his eyes lay next to the drain in the otherwise-spotless tub, darker than the most cerulean sea and incapable of tears. Blood had spattered where they’d fallen, but otherwise, the porcelain remained white, white, white. His palms were stained rust-dark; so were his clothes. I nearly slipped in the blood covering the floor, but in the vast, arctic space of the tub, there were only a few drops, trailing from the drain back to the eyes.
“I can still see.” Vincenzo’s sobs turned to laughter while I held him. I couldn’t make his dreams stop, either, but at least I resisted the urge to taste his bloody tears.
“Hello, Vincenzo.” I can’t tell if he flinches or not when I lay my hand on his shoulder.
“You smell like her,” he says. Did I tell him about Josie? My stomach turns.
“I need information.” My soles should be hard after years of running; my soul should be hard after years of leaving myself behind. Some things R’lyeh will never cure. Not in any place—not in any time.
It’s what I was counting on.
“Watch the painting.” Vincenzo’s voice holds the same quavering tone as Josie’s song.
Pain flickers through the space where his eyes should be, stars shifting through black, bloody caverns. I see blue, crimson-tinged spheres against porcelain-white; I feel him shaking in my arms. It’s too late for apologies.
Vincenzo sets aside a canvas of writhing blues and greens. The paint is still wet, fresh and thick. I want to run my hands through it and feel it between my fingers like river mud. I want to drift in it and be seen by a vast, opening eye. I want to be told I did the right thing.
Vincenzo places a fresh canvas on the easel. His arm jerks, spastic. I watch over his shoulder as he paints. Flames. Venice burns.
“Thank you.” I put my lips close his ear. Vincenzo’s body hitches; he might be bleeding the paint—crimson, saffron, umber. He doesn’t stop. I leave him to his colours and his pain.
I shift. Sideways, cross-wise, moving through a cold space as crushing as the deepest parts of the sea. My lungs compress. I could not scream if I wanted to. Tendrils wrap me, loving me. They lap my heart, sucker-hold it; they caress every part of my spine. They take a bitter-sweet song sung in a smoky voice like burnt almonds. I shiver as it fades; salt lingers on my tongue. It leaks from my eyes and I don’t bother to brush it away.
Venice burns.
Heat batters my cheeks, drying stinging eyes. I throw an arm up to shield my face. Inhuman tongues hiss unknown words, shiver laughter, babbling inside the flames. The stars spin. The canal heaves. Angles and rounded nubs of stone-not-stone—worn by untold eons—rise, dripping. The city would shudder in revulsion if it could; instead, it screams as it burns.
Against all reason, I turn toward the city’s fire-wrapped heart. Sweat pools beneath my leather. My scars itch, pulling tight between jutting blades of bone.
Marco is here. I was wrong. He wasn’t seeking the end of the world, just the end of his world.
I find him in the little restaurant off Calle Mandola—Josie’s restaurant. The soles of my boots have almost melted. Heat-cracked, multi-coloured glass from the shop across the street crunches under my feet.
The restaurant’s walls are black, curling with smoke-wrought shadows. They don’t shift and unfold yet, but they will. Everyone else has either fled or burnt to death. Only Marco remains, belly-up to the bar. His hair, greasy as it is, should burn. Instead, it clings to his collar, loving. I think of water-wet tendrils cupping pale skin.
He turns a pock-marked face towards me, unsurprised. Flame makes his already-dark skin ruddy. His eyes shine, and not only with the glow of alcohol. He mimes a toast, lifting his glass, and throws the liquor back, grimacing.
“I knew my mother would send someone.”
I don’t bother to answer. How long until the flames reach us? I pour myself a drink, and refill Marco’s glass. Nothing unfolds against my tongue as I drink. My eyes don’t water. It’s only alcohol.
“She wants you to come home.” I pour again.
Marco slugs the drink in his glass. His eyes shine empty, staring into a middle distance only he can see. When he ran, how far did he go? Has he seen the end of all things? Did he watch his mother die screaming? His eyes are unsettling. Not burnt-wood, something else.
“What are you running from?” he asks.
My stomach lurches. I try to pour another shot, but most of it spills on the bar. It will evaporate soon; the bar will go up in flames. All this alcohol—we’re a Molotov cocktail, waiting to happen. “What do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t have chased me this far if you weren’t running from something.” Marco’s eyes fix me. I know the colour now—river-mud brown.
I shudder. The sensation goes all through me. I don’t taste what’s in my glass; I taste cheap wine stolen from a funeral table the day we buried our parents—my father, his mother.
Jason. My stepbrother.
I saved his life once, pulled him out of the river after he slipped on a rock. He was nine; I was ten. Lying on his back, rocks darkening with the water running from his skin, squinting up into the sun, he called me his guardian angel.
I breathe deep, and draw in a lungful of wet leather and hay. Firelight flickers from the old trashcan we dragged into the barn. Rain drums the roof. Our feet hang over the edge of the loft, heels kicking dust-pale wood. A horse whickers softly.
“I hate them,” my stepbrother says.
“Who?” I drink straight from the bottle, bitter tannins clinging to my skin, staining cracked lips red.
“All those people at Mom and Dad’s funeral. They’re all a bunch of fucking phonies.”
He takes the bottle from me. I nod. A storm hangs over us that has nothing to do with the rain. A weight presses between my shoulder blades; my skin itches. I know Jason feels it, too. There is something waiting to rise.
Then, there, I am pulled out of myself. I am in Venice, looking at Marco across the bar, watching the world burn. I am floating above the vastness of a star-filled eye. Time means nothing.
I know what I will do to survive.
My stepbrother hes the res
t of the wine, tosses the bottle against the far wall where it shatters, spraying glass. A few droplets fall into the fire, making it snap and sizzle. I retrieve another bottle, pen-knife out the cork. We stole a whole armful as we left the funeral.
My stepbrother says, “They’re lucky they aren’t alive to see what happens next.”
I don’t have to ask what he means. He feels what’s coming, but has he seen the end of the world? Does he know what I’ll do to make sure I will?
“What’s the worst sin you can think of?” I squint into the dark on the far side of the barn. “Not that Bible shit. Something real.”
Shadows shift, fold and unfold. Jason looks down, heels drumming the wood, dust spinning up every time they hit.
“Hurting someone you love and meaning it.”
I nod. The stars shift. They’ve always been right. They prick the sky, prick my skin, and draw blood. I know what I have to do to survive. Tendrils reach for me, the colour of starlight and as cold as the moon. I have to wrap myself in a sin I can never forgive, the worst thing I can think of, a pain I can never forget or give away. It’s the only way to stay human.
I reach for Jason’s hand, squeeze fingers as chill as ice.
“The world is ending.” Jason’s breath is rapid, wine hot.
I nod, lean close. Our faces almost touch. He understands what’s coming and he wants me to save myself because I once saved him. I could refuse his gift, but I don’t. My heart beats, cracks, and salty water rushes in.
“It’s already ended,” Jason says.
“So, fuck me.” I pull him close, bite down hard on a kiss. I taste cheap wine and blood.
It would be mercy to say I slid into oblivion, but I felt every minute. I tasted every drop of sweat. I cherished every tear, cradled it on my tongue. After, Jason slept. I drank half the remaining bottle of wine, and threw the rest into the trashcan—a spray of glass, a gout of flame, the horse’s soft whinny turning into a scream of fear.
Future Lovecraft Page 15