Honey is Sweeter than Blood

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Under the pavilion of the tree they idly scanned the rest of the graveyard around them. “Cows used to graze in that field.” Jen pointed beyond a distant fence. It was a corn field now. A shiny-domed silo protruded above the trees at its farthest edge.

  Diane touched the damp bark of the tree, and shuddered. She looked directly at it. Mossy grooves. Hard wrinkles of age. “I should carve their names here. Wouldn’t that he neat?” she breathed.

  “Yeah. But the tree’s so old…you shouldn’t hurt it.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t, I’m just saying. The best thing would be if they were both buried right here.”

  “Mm,” Jen grunted, slapping at a mosquito that nuzzled the back of her neck. She wanted to go. It was near dusk, too, and she sure didn’t want to be in a graveyard in the dark.

  “I can picture them.”

  Jen looked to Diane with a big grin. “Oh? Doing it right here where we stand, huh?”

  “No. Right here where the tree stands.”

  “Yeah, with mosquitoes all over Dave’s rear.” Slap.

  “How is it, Jen…with you and Kevin?”

  “Don’t feel bad about it, Diane, you’re only eighteen…you aren’t a crone. It can be excellent and it can be blah and usually it’s somewhere in-between. You aren’t any less alive than me, Di, believe me.”

  Diane was staring blankly down into the grass. An ant crawled across a mushroom. “My mind knows that. My body says different. Sometimes it hits me so strong. Like right now.” She swallowed. “I don’t mean to embarrass you and spill my guts on your feet, but just thinking about that couple on this very spot seventy years ago…doing it in the open air… a huge dark storm gathering above. Then a lightning bolt hits them…”

  Jen chuckled uncomfortably.

  “I know,” Diane smiled, “but it does grab you, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess. The analogy or whatever. But it isn’t always thunder and lightning, Diane…sometimes it’s just a breeze. I don’t want you to be disappointed later, and build it up now into some dynamic fantasy experience.”

  “I know better than to do that,” Diane murmured softly. When she lifted her gaze she realized Jen was watching her run her flattened palm up and down the darkly glistening dinosaur hide of the oak tree.

  A rustling sound above, maybe a scurrying stirring. Diane looked up. A darting form. Blur of fast-moving life. A squirrel. Branches shook. A small rain of loosed drops pattered across her face.

  * * *

  The next time Diane was alone, and had her book. She came several days a week during the remainder of that summer. Once in a while a few boys on bikes would sail past on the paved paths and she would feel embarrassed…guilty, even, as if she’d been caught arousing herself.

  In a way, she had. And soon, she did.

  She would sometimes lay the book in her lap, one hand under it, and rest her shoulders and head back against the tree with eyes closed. She wore a halter top several times so as to feel the bark directly on her pale skin. Once she even went around behind the giant tree, hidden from the paths, and lowered her halter to embrace the tree, its hard furrows impressing her shy soft breasts and her pimpled cheek. Afterwards she was shaken, confused, ashamed, and didn’t do that again.

  Autumn came. She sat in the gold, let it shower her…but with the fall and the first year of college, her thoughts of David McKay and Marie Barnes had begun to dwindle like the leaves. In the snow she came just once, and stayed under the barren tree on the skull-like mound only a few moments. She felt nothing.

  Her pimples didn’t leave, only changed location like stars with the passage of time.

  She didn’t think to return to the tree until late May.

  It was a humid afternoon, advance notice of summer. The cemetery was not yet burned yellow. The grass was long already even after last week’s trim for Memorial Day, so full of life and vitality was it. It was especially lush in the shadows crowning the mound.

  Diane stood a little apart from the tree, hugging herself. The shade was cool, as if she were in a forest hollow. She wore shorts and a t-shirt, and much flesh was open to the air. She actually felt gooseflesh rise on her forearms and rubbed at it. She neared the tree. Reached delicately to it.

  It was so cool she almost flinched. She ran a finger lightly along inside a groove. An ant traveled in another groove. Diane took in long slow breaths of the mushroom-darkened air.

  She turned at a faint rustling of the grass near the mammoth roots in time to see a breeze sweep gently down through it.

  Diane came back with her book the next day.

  * * *

  It was dusk, eight-thirty on a July evening.

  Diane had stepped out of her underpants, and trembled as she straightened, hugged her goose-bumped arms across her breasts. She felt as if her new husband lay on their honeymoon bed watching her, smiling, patting the sheets invitingly. But she had no husband. She was alone. Before her stretched the gravestones almost phosphorescent in the black-grassed gloom.

  The soundless heat lightning lit the horizon, silhouetting tree-tops and the ominous silo. It was this lightning which had inspired her to ride out here, as if it had summoned her. With its energy. Its power.

  She was afraid…but her body crawled with hungry ants and fluttered with birds. See? An ant had just crawled onto her bare foot…but she nervously brushed it away.

  She was waiting. She didn’t know how to make the first move—she was a virgin.

  Yes you do, she argued with herself. You’re just afraid. You tried it before. You know how. You’re just afraid to go all the way.

  I’m not afraid. I want this.

  She went behind the tree and hugged her nakedness to it. She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek hard into it, so that it would leave an impression of its bark there when she moved away. The smell of damp ancient life was so close. An ant crawled across her lower lip but this time she let it. A smile hesitantly blossomed. Diane moaned a little, and nuzzled her nose into the cracked hide. She extended her tongue and lazily drew it along a groove in the bark. On the next stroke she probed another. The ant crawled into her mouth. She was a bit apprehensive but swallowed it in saliva.

  A bright, silent flash made her open her eyes.

  It had grown so much darker in the short time her eyes had been shut, but she could see the grass at the base of the tree swaying. It rustled. There was a soft, almost imperceptible rhythm to its stirrings.

  Diane moaned, hooking her fingers into the bark’s grooves, watching the grass stir.

  She only heard it once, and she was moaning herself when she heard it so she couldn’t be sure of the moan…

  * * *

  For her brother’s wedding, Jen had gone out of her way to fix Diane up with her cousin Richard, but Diane hadn’t made the effort to dance with him once…even after she told Diane that Richard had shyly confided in her that he found Diane cute and—she swore to God he’d actually said it—sexy. How could Diane have been so nonchalant, and smilingly so?

  Today her shadowy concerns about Diane were pulled into stark daylight. Diane had called her up, sobbing, nearly frantic. And here they now stood—at the foot of the mound in Pine Grove Cemetery.

  The mound was yellow. A vast plateau of a tree stump crowned it.

  Diane clung to her friend’s arm. “How could they kill it? Why?”

  “It was old, Di…”

  “It was alive! It was still alive! Oh god …my tree…”

  “Diane, you’ve got to stop this…come on.”

  Diane drew away, smiling sharply. “I do have to stop it now, don’t I? They haven’t left me any choice. All I had and they took it away. But we can’t have a nasty little menage-a-trois in our pious little cemetery, can we ?”

  “Diane…”

  “Yeah, look at me like that. You have a boyfriend. A lover…”

  “Don’t be jealous of me…”

  “I saw them! I could actually see them the last few times, Jen…not just pictur
e them; I saw them! And they saw me too, I’m sure. We could have truly joined together, all three of us, I know it, but now they’ve killed them and they’ve killed me too!”

  “Diane, let me help you…”

  “Go away! You don’t understand!”

  “Yes I do…”

  “Go away, go away, go away, go away!” Diane tore up the mound and flung herself like a sacrifice across the circular altar table atop it, arms and legs spread.

  Good God, thought Jen, almost terrified of her friend, even as she went up the small hill after her. It was late afternoon and the air was dark with the threat of rain and no one knew she was alone here with Diane.

  Diane’s head lifted, her round face glistening with tears but she was grinning and an ant crawled across her forehead. “Shhh,” she grinned, “can you hear it ? Can you feel it? The throb?”

  “Diane…”

  “They’re alive. It isn’t dead. It was just an outgrowth of them but they’re still there. Can you hear them? They never stop…it’s just that the storms bring it closer to our senses. The storm locked them here. I’ve tapped into it. I want more.”

  Rain started falling, big hard pellets of it. As Diane stood the sky rumbled and Jen withdrew a step. Eyes locked on Jen’s, Diane pulled away the elastic band that restrained her once short hair, now falling darkly to her shoulders, and then undid the buttons of her blouse.

  “Want to watch?”

  “I’m going for help, Diane…you need help.” Jen was so afraid of her friend now she almost hated her.

  “Go away. Leave me alone. You don’t feel them…”

  “I’ll be back, Diane. Don’t make me bring people here and embarrass you. I mean it…”

  Thunder boomed far away, rolled heavily toward them like a surf. Diane shrugged off her blouse; it slithered down her body to pool at her ankles. Rain splashed her bare shoulders as she reached around behind to unhook her bra. “You’re the one embarrassed, Jen, not me.”

  Jen whirled to run, slipped, slid down the mound on her rear, smudging blackened mushrooms on the way. She was crying now. She hit the paved path and ran…

  Once she stopped to glance back. Just once, before she raced to her parked car and downtown to the police station. The mound was distant, but there were no trees close by it and it loomed distinct. And there on the pedestal tree trunk stood Diane—fully, whitely naked, almost phosphorescent in the wet dark, her pubic hair like a blotch of deep shade…a living monument, legs together and arms upraised to the heavy lowering sky…

  The bolt that killed Diane had rattled the police station’s windows with its force, Jen would realize later.

  * * *

  Even years later Jen would stop at the base of the mound with her daughter in a stroller, and on occasion go so far as to climb the hill to stand and close her eyes, and gingerly feel for what Diane had said to have felt of the power rooted there, the passion impressed on the spot. And she did come to feel something etched there, she believed in time.

  Loneliness, she felt. And sadness.

  Scorpion Face

  If John could see his own alternate self, on that other plane of existence in which it resides, he might name that being Scorpion Face.

  This creature, smaller than John by a foot and greatly bent in addition to that, has a pale bald head twice the size of John’s and a face that shades into obsidian black. These chitinous features look mechanical but are organic; two matching rows of articulated arms with a tail-like limb at the bottom which uncoils seemingly upon its own will to flick at the air. Sloughing gauzy membranes like cobwebs cover its long bony hands and the back of its head in place of hair. It wears shabby black clothes—much too small even for its tiny frame—like a tuxedo with a long forked tail. Whenever it ventures out it wears an immense top hat. It never goes outdoors when it goes out, however, as there is no outdoors in its dimension…only endless labyrinths, tunnels, dust-choked attics upon attics, web-cloaked basements and sub-basements.

  John wakes to a clock radio that blares annoying snatches of music between lengthy discourses by smarmy D.J.s. He opens his eyes to a gray and wordless despair, as he does every day, his only comfort being that he can hit the snooze alarm and sleep another half hour before waking again to a gray and wordless despair.

  In its world, John’s doppleganger sits in a corner with its great head resting on its knees, its spindly arms wrapped around its shins. Pain awakens it, and it scrambles out of the corner on hands and knees, glancing back over its shoulder at the long black nails which continue to extend from the walls where they meet. The being trails the shroud of cobwebs which has formed like a cocoon around its body while it slept, the stuff of its own dreaming exhalations. Standing, it brushes more of the webs off its arms and sides. With jerky darting motions like those of a bird, its facial appendages clicking, the creature moves to a cracked and slanted mirror. When it sees its reflection, it wails in a high shrieking voice, just as it does every day.

  John drinks an instant coffee, showers, drives thirty minutes to work. As he steps out of his car and looks across the lot at the squat, sprawling building bleak against the blue winter sky, he has the irrational impulse to duck back inside his car and drive away, drive anywhere, without direction, without money, to just escape in a blind and numbing panic. Instead, he starts across the parking lot to the building’s metal side door.

  Top hat on, Scorpion Face emerges from its series of small dusty rooms into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor formed from rotting planks of wood, stretching off in either direction into seemingly limitless gloom. As it makes its way, a walk of several hours by John’s reckoning of time, it passes off-branching hallways, and metal hatches in the ceiling and floor with ladders to other levels. The walls change from wood into riveted plates of black metal scabbed with rust, covered in cables and hoses, turning gears and churning pistons, grease and dripping slime, and Scorpion Face has to tear its way through veils of web at times. Finally, for the last stretch of its walk, the corridor becomes chiseled from rock, slick with mold and trickling with water, lit with far-spaced bare bulbs. It stops at last at a door labeled with fifteen black nails driven into the wood in a circle, with a huge white moth pinned in the middle of the circle by those spikes. The moth twitches, still alive. The being turns the knob and lets itself into its work place. At no time since leaving its apartment has it seen another of its kind.

  John sits in a cubicle with padded partitions upon which are pinned a few snapshots of his two daughters, whom his wife has custody of. He speaks on the phone for much of the day, but seldom to the people in the other cubicles. Just these disembodied voices, usually angry at him because to them he is the company personified, he is that bleak sprawling building, and he tries to soothe them. He will run a UPS trace to find out why they haven’t received their package. He will have them credited. He will do his best. He logs each call he makes onto a sheet. Usually a hundred unhappy voices a day. He feels like a medium who can only channel the voices of furious ghosts.

  Scorpion Face stands in a tiny chamber that shakes like a rickety elevator, great unseen machinery clanking and thrumming behind the metal walls. Glass tubes criss-cross before its gaze, and it watches hordes of tiny insects crawl through these, each insect carrying a glowing orange nugget of matter like a hot glob of metal. The little entity throws switches that close off one tube, open another, direct the insect stream here instead of there. Occasionally steam bursts from a vent in the wall. Once in a while a sound of rushing liquid passes beneath its feet. Its top hat hangs from a nail in the wall, the only other decoration being four huge black snail shells stuck to the walls here and here. Tomorrow they will have slowly repositioned themselves, but they will not have escaped this room.

  At lunch, John buys a tuna sandwich from a machine and sits alone at a table to eat it and drink oily black coffee. The lettuce in his sandwich is slippery and limp. He finds it hard to imagine that this tuna and that coffee found their origins in living things. F
rom the corner of his eye he watches young office girls clustered at one table, pretty and giggling and as removed from him as the women on television. He focuses on the Marketing supervisor, who is young and very pretty and crouches in front of the refrigerator to get something from the bottom shelf, her shirt riding up to show the taut skin of her lower back. He pictures himself holding her waist and entering her from behind. It’s the position he fantasizes about most, because he is made uncomfortable by the idea of a woman actually looking into his eyes during intimacy.

  Scorpion Face takes one break in what by John’s perception would be sixteen hours. It opens a cabinet, and inside finds four glass jars filled with a glowing green fluid. It unbuttons its vest and its shirt beneath, and then slides open a tiny drawer from inside its abdomen. Into this metal drawer it pours the contents of each jar, slowly, until the drawer is full. It carefully slides this drawer back into its flesh, rearranges its clothing, and then replaces the small jars inside the cabinet. It never sees who fills the jars in its absence. It never sees any other of its kind. They work different shifts, travel by different corridors, live and work in different rooms. It has never seen another of its kind, and never will.

  At home, John logs onto the internet. He enters—stealthily and guiltily as if peering into a bedroom window—a sex-oriented chat room. He finds a woman willing to talk dirty with him. He suspects she is lying about her blond hair and breast size and maybe even her gender but it doesn’t really matter. He masturbates right there at his desk, one hand on the mouse as if that is his penis. Afterwards he feels empty, as if he is squeezing out a dollop of his soul each time, and never getting it back. He shuts off that box and turns on the box of his TV instead, watches one obnoxious sitcom after another, cute friends and cute lovers feuding and making up. He finds it hard to believe those actors are living beings like himself. He likes to read in magazines about actors who are addicted to drugs, or commit suicide.

  In its own series of rooms again, Scorpion Face stands before a control panel of wheels and levers, and manipulates a metal puppet inside a booth recessed in the wall. Some of the marionette’s complex joints and multiple limbs are articulated by wires from above, and others by rods from below. A second silhouetted spider-thing emerges from a hole in the opposite wall, commanded by whatever unseen being lives in the next apartment. The two puppets begin to interact erotically with grinding and scraping sounds, their many limbs inter-weaving. Particles of rust or blistered paint sift from between their frenziedly abrading forms. They pump and thrash, scuttle entwined, and Scorpion Face watches dully enraptured, projecting its imagination inside them. At last the puppets lie quiet, limbs and wires still tangled, and the being slumps exhausted at the controls, hands clammy as they clutch onto the wheels for support. The other’s spider disengages itself and withdraws through a black curtain over that hole in the wall. The lights in the puppet theater go dim. It’s time to retire for the night…although there is no day or night here.