by Guran, Paula
“You know where you are?” the eunuch asked; it had a woman’s voice and a hint of a Russian accent, but I was pretty sure both were only affectations. First rule of demon brothels: Check your preconceptions of male and female at the door. Second rule: Appearances are fucking meant to be deceiving.
“Sure,” I moaned and tried not to think about vomiting. “I might have a notion or three.”
“Good. Then you lie still and take it easy, Miss Beaumont. We’ve got a few questions need answering.” Which made it mutual, but I kept my mouth shut on that account. The voice was beginning to sound not so much feminine as what you might hear if you scraped frozen pork back and forth across a cheese grater. “This afternoon, you were contacted by an associate of Madam Harpootlian’s, yes? She told you her name was Ellen Andrews. That’s not her true name, of course. Just something she heard in a motion picture—”
“Of course,” I replied. “You sort never bother with your real names. Anyway, what of it?”
“She asked you to go see Jimmy Fong and bring her something, yes? Something very precious. Something powerful and rare.”
“The dingus,” I said, rubbing at my aching head. “Right, but . . . hey . . . Fong was already dead when I got there, scout’s honor. Andrews told me one of Szabó’s people did him.”
“The Chinese gentleman’s fate is no concern of ours,” the eunuch said. “But we need to talk about Ellen Andrews. She has caused this house serious inconvenience. She’s troubled us, and troubles us still.”
“You and me both, bub,” I said. It was just starting to dawn on me how there were some sizable holes in my memory. I clearly recalled the taste of rye, and gazing down at the park, but then nothing. Nothing at all. I asked the ginger demon, “Where is she? And how’d I get here, anyway?”
“We seem to have many of the same questions,” it replied, dispassionate as a corpse. “You answer ours, maybe we shall find the answers to yours along the way.”
I knew damn well I didn’t have much say in the matter. After all, I’d been down this road before. When Auntie H. wants answers, she doesn’t usually bother with asking. Why waste your time wondering if someone’s feeding you a load of baloney when all you gotta do is reach inside his brain and help yourself to whatever you need?
“Fine,” I said, trying not to tense up, because tensing up only ever makes it worse. “How about let’s cut the chitchat and get this over with.”
“Very well, but you should know,” it said, “Madam regrets the necessity of this imposition.” And then there were the usual wet, squelching noises as the relevant appendages unfurled and slithered across the floor toward me.
“Sure, no problem. Ain’t no secret Madam’s got a heart of gold,” and maybe I shouldn’t have smarted off like that, because when the stingers hit me, they hit hard. Harder than I knew was necessary to make the connection. I might have screamed. I know I pissed myself. And then it was inside me, prowling about, roughly picking its way through my conscious and unconscious mind—through my soul, if that word suits you better. All the heady sounds and smells of the brothel faded away, along with my physical discomfort. For a while I drifted nowhere and nowhen in particular, and then, then I stopped drifting . . .
. . . Ellen asked me, “You ever think you’ve had enough? Of the life, I mean. Don’t you sometimes contemplate just up and blowing town, not even stopping long enough to look back? Doesn’t that ever cross your mind, Nat?”
I sipped my whiskey and watched her, undressing her with my eyes and not especially ashamed of myself for doing so. “Not too often,” I said. “I’ve had it worse. This gig’s not perfect, but I usually get a fair shake.”
“Yeah, usually,” she said, her words hardly more than a sigh. “Just, now and then, I feel like I’m missing out.”
I laughed, and she glared at me.
“You’d cut a swell figure in a breadline,” I said, and took another swallow of the rye.
“I hate when people laugh at me.”
“Then don’t say funny things,” I told her.
And that’s when she turned and took my glass. I thought she was about to tell me to get lost, and don’t let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Instead, she set the drink down on the silver serving tray, and she kissed me. Her mouth tasted like peaches. Peaches and cinnamon. Then she pulled back, and her eyes flashed red, the way they had in the Yellow Dragon, only now I knew it wasn’t an illusion.
“You’re a demon,” I said, not all that surprised.
“Only a quarter. My grandmother . . . Well, I’d rather not get into that, if it’s all the same to you. Is it a problem?”
“No, it’s not a problem,” I replied, and she kissed me again. Right about here, I started to feel the first twinges of whatever she’d put into the Sazerac, but, frankly, I was too horny to heed the warning signs.
“I’ve got a plan,” she said, whispering, as if she were afraid someone was listening in. “I have it all worked out, but I wouldn’t mind some company on the road.”
“I have no . . . no idea . . . what you’re talking about,” and there was something else I wanted to say, but I’d begun slurring my words and decided against it. I put a hand on her left breast, and she didn’t stop me.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, kissing me again, and right about then, that’s when the curtain came crashing down, and the ginger-colored demon in my brain turned a page . . .
. . . I opened my eyes, and I was lying in a black room. I mean, a perfectly black room. Every wall had been painted matte black, and the ceiling, and the floor. If there were any windows, they’d also been painted over, or boarded up. I was cold, and a moment later I realized that was because I was naked. I was naked and lying at the center of a wide white pentagram that had been chalked onto that black floor. A white pentagram held within a white circle. There was a single white candle burning at each of the five points. I looked up, and Ellen Andrews was standing above me. Like me, she was naked. Except she was wearing that dingus from the lacquered box, fitted into a leather harness strapped about her hips. The phallus drooped obscenely and glimmered in the candlelight. There were dozens of runic and Enochian symbols painted on her skin in blood and shit and charcoal. Most of them I recognized. At her feet, there was a small iron cauldron, and a black-handled dagger, and something dead. It might have been a rabbit, or a small dog. I couldn’t be sure which, because she’d skinned it.
Ellen looked down, and saw me looking up at her. She frowned, and tilted her head to one side. For just a second, there was something undeniably predatory in that expression, something murderous. All spite and not a jot of mercy. For that second, I was face to face with the one quarter of her bloodline that changed all the rules, the ancestor she hadn’t wanted to talk about. But then that second passed, and she softly whispered, “I have a plan, Natalie Beaumont.”
“What are you doing?” I asked her. But my mouth was so dry and numb, my throat so parched, it felt like I took forever to cajole my tongue into shaping those four simple words.
“No one will know,” she said. “I promise. Not Harpootlian, not Szabó, not anyone. I’ve been over this a thousand times, worked all the angles.” And she went down on one knee then, leaning over me. “But you’re supposed to be asleep, Nat.”
“Ellen, you don’t cross Harpootlian,” I croaked.
“Trust me,” she said.
In that place, the two of us adrift on an island of light in an endless sea of blackness, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was down now, and I reached up, brushing it back from her face. When my fingers moved across her scalp, I found two stubby horns, but it wasn’t anything a girl couldn’t hide with the right hairdo and a hat.
“Ellen, what are you doing?”
“I’m about to give you a gift, Nat. The most exquisite gift in all creation. A gift that even the angels might covet. You wanted to know what the unicorn does. Well, I’m not going to tell you; I’m going to show you.”
She put a hand between my legs and found I was already wet.
I licked at my chapped lips, fumbling for words that wouldn’t come. Maybe I didn’t know what she was getting at, this gift, but I had a feeling I didn’t want any part of it, no matter how exquisite it might be. I knew these things, clear as day, but I was lost in the beauty of her, and whatever protests I might have uttered, they were about as sincere as ol’ Brer Rabbit begging Brer Fox not to throw him into that briar patch. I could say I was bewitched, but it would be a lie.
She mounted me then, and I didn’t argue.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Now I fuck you,” she replied. “Then I’m going to talk to my grandmother.” And, with that, the world fell out from beneath me again. And the ginger-skinned eunuch moved along to the next tableau, that next set of memories I couldn’t recollect on my own . . .
. . . Stars were tumbling from the skies. Not a few stray shooting stars here and there. No, all the stars were falling. One by one, at first, and then the sky was raining pitchforks, only it wasn’t rain, see. It was light. The whole sorry world was being born or was dying, and I saw it didn’t much matter which. Go back far enough, or far enough forward, the past and future wind up holding hands, cozy as a couple of lovebirds. Ellen had thrown open a doorway, and she’d dragged me along for the ride. I was so cold. I couldn’t understand how there could be that much fire in the sky, and me still be freezing my tits off like that. I lay there shivering as the brittle vault of heaven collapsed. I could feel her inside me. I could feel it inside me, and same as I’d been lost in Ellen’s beauty, I was being smothered by that ecstasy. And then . . . then the eunuch showed me the gift, which I’d forgotten . . . and which I would immediately forget again.
How do you write about something, when all that remains of it is the faintest of impressions of glory? When all you can bring to mind is the empty place where a memory ought to be and isn’t, and only that conspicuous absence is there to remind you of what cannot ever be recalled? Strain as you might, all that effort hardly adds up to a trip for biscuits. So, how do you write it down? You don’t, that’s how. You do your damnedest to think about what came next, instead, knowing your sanity hangs in the balance.
So, here’s what came after the gift, since le godemiché maudit is a goddamn Indian giver if ever one was born. Here’s the curse that rides shotgun on the gift, as impossible to obliterate from reminiscence as the other is to awaken.
There were falling stars, and that unendurable cold . . . and then the empty, aching socket to mark the countermanded gift . . . and then I saw the unicorn. I don’t mean the dingus. I mean the living creature, standing in a glade of cedars, bathed in clean sunlight and radiating a light all its own. It didn’t look much like what you see in storybooks or those medieval tapestries they got hanging in the Cloisters. It also didn’t look much like the beast carved into the lid of Fong’s wooden box. But I knew what it was, all the same.
A naked girl stood before it, and the unicorn kneeled at her feet. She sat down, and it rested its head on her lap. She whispered reassurances I couldn’t hear, because they were spoken as softly as falling snow. And then she offered the unicorn one of her breasts, and I watched as it suckled. This scene of chastity and absolute peace lasted maybe a minute, maybe two, before the trap was sprung and the hunters stepped out from the shadows of the cedar boughs. They killed the unicorn, with cold iron lances and swords, but first the unicorn killed the virgin who’d betrayed it to its doom . . .
. . . And Harpootlian’s ginger eunuch turned another page (a hamfisted analogy if ever there was one, but it works for me), and we were back in the black room. Ellen and me. Only two of the candles were still burning, two guttering, halfhearted counterpoints to all that darkness. The other three had been snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind that had smelled of rust, sulfur, and slaughterhouse floors. I could hear Ellen crying, weeping somewhere in the darkness beyond the candles and the periphery of her protective circle. I rolled over onto my right side, still shivering, still so cold I couldn’t imagine being warm ever again. I stared into the black, blinking and dimly amazed that my eyelids hadn’t frozen shut. Then something snapped into focus, and there she was, cowering on her hands and knees, a tattered rag of a woman lost in the gloom. I could see her stunted, twitching tail, hardly as long as my middle finger, and the thing from the box was still strapped to her crotch. Only now it had a twin, clutched tightly in her left hand.
I think I must have asked her what the hell she’d done, though I had a pretty good idea. She turned toward me, and her eyes . . . Well, you see that sort of pain, and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget you saw it.
“I didn’t understand,” she said, still sobbing. “I didn’t understand she’d take so much of me away.”
A bitter wave of conflicting, irreconcilable emotion surged and boiled about inside me. Yeah, I knew what she’d done to me, and I knew I’d been used for something unspeakable. I knew violation was too tame a word for it, and that I’d been marked forever by this gold-digging half-breed of a twist. And part of me was determined to drag her kicking and screaming to Harpootlian. Or fuck it, I could kill her myself, and take my own sweet time doing so. I could kill her the way the hunters had murdered the unicorn. But—on the other hand—the woman I saw lying there before me was shattered almost beyond recognition. There’d been a steep price for her trespass, and she’d paid it and then some. Besides, I was learning fast that when you’ve been to Hades’s doorstep with someone, and the two of you make it back more or less alive, there’s a bond, whether you want it or not. So, there we were, a cheap, latter-day parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, and all I could think about was holding her, tight as I could, until she stopped crying and I was warm again.
“She took so much,” Ellen whispered. I didn’t ask what her grandmother had taken. Maybe it was a slice of her soul, or maybe a scrap of her humanity. Maybe it was the memory of the happiest day of her life, or the ability to taste her favorite food. It didn’t seem to matter. It was gone, and she’d never get it back. I reached for her, too cold and too sick to speak, but sharing her hurt and needing to offer my hollow consolation, stretching out to touch . . .
. . . And the eunuch said, “Madam wishes to speak with you now,” and that’s when I realized the parade down memory lane was over. I was back at Harpootlian’s, and there was a clock somewhere chiming down to 3:00 a.m., the dead hour. I could feel the nasty welt the stingers had left at the base of my skull and underneath my jaw, and I still hadn’t shaken off the hangover from that tainted shot of rye whiskey. But above and underneath and all about these mundane discomforts was a far more egregious pang, a portrait of that guileless white beast cut down and its blood spurting from gaping wounds. Still, I did manage to get myself upright without puking. Sure, I gagged once or twice, but I didn’t puke. I pride myself on that. I sat with my head cradled in my hands, waiting for the room to stop tilting and sliding around like I’d gone for a spin on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel.
“Soon, you’ll feel better, Miss Beaumont.”
“Says you,” I replied. “Anyway, give me a half a fucking minute, will you please? Surely your employer isn’t gonna cast a kitten if you let me get my bearings first, not after the work over you just gave me. Not after—”
“I will remind you, her patience is not infinite,” the ginger demon said firmly, and then it clicked its long claws together.
“Yeah?” I asked. “Well, who the hell’s is?” But I’d gotten the message, plain and clear. The gloves were off, and whatever forbearance Auntie H. might have granted me in the past, it was spent, and now I was living on the installment plan. I took a deep breath and struggled to my feet. At least the eunuch didn’t try to lend a hand.
I can’t say for certain when Yeksabet Harpootlian set up shop in Manhattan, but I have it on good faith that Magdalena Szabó was here first. And anyone who knows her onions knows the two of them have been at eac
h other’s throats since the day Auntie H. decided to claim a slice of the action for herself. Now, you’d think there’d be plenty enough of the hellion cock-and-tail trade to go around, what with all the netherworlders who call the five boroughs their home away from home. And likely as not, you’d be right. Just don’t try telling that to Szabó or Auntie H. Sure, they’ve each got their elite stable of “girls and boys,” and they both have more customers than they know what to do with. Doesn’t stop them from spending every waking hour looking for a way to banish the other once and for all—or at least find the unholy grail of competitive advantages.
Now, by the time the ginger-skinned eunuch led me through the chaos of Auntie H.’s stately pleasure dome, far below the subways and sewers and tenements of the Lower East Side, I already had a pretty good idea the dingus from Jimmy Fong’s shiny box was meant to be Harpootlian’s trump card. Only, here was Ellen Andrews, this mutt of a courier, gumming up the works, playing fast and loose with the loving cup. And here was me, stuck smack in the middle, the unwilling stooge in her double-cross.
As I followed the eunuch down the winding corridor that ended in Auntie H.’s grand salon, we passed doorway after doorway, all of them opening onto scenes of inhuman passion and madness, the most odious of perversions, and tortures that make short work of merely mortal flesh. It would be disingenuous to say I looked away. After all, this wasn’t my first time. Here were the hinterlands of wanton physical delight and agony, where the two become indistinguishable in a rapturous Totentanz. Here were spectacles to remind me how Doré and Hieronymus Bosch never even came close, and all of it laid bare for the eyes of any passing voyeur. You see, there are no locked doors to be found at Madam Harpootlian’s. There are no doors at all.
“It’s a busy night,” the eunuch said, though it looked like business as usual to me.
“Sure,” I muttered. “You’d think the Shriners were in town. You’d think Mayor La Guardia himself had come down off his high horse to raise a little hell.”