Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “He’s dead, then. Or gone,” Rex said.

  “No, not that,” she said, looking directly into Jane’s eyes, “you can’t find him. He finds you. And when he finds you, you are no longer who you are. You are no longer who you were. You become.”

  Jane spent the afternoon writing in her notebooks:

  Nathan Meritt may be dead. He would be, what, fifty? Could he have really survived here all this time? Wouldn’t he self-destruct, given his proclivities? I want him to exist. I want to believe he is what the locals say he is. The White Devil. Destruction and Creation in mortal form. Supplanted the local goddess. Legend beyond what a human is capable of. The woman with the scoured face. The children without skins. The trail of stories that followed him through this wilderness. Settling in White Chapel, his spiritual home. White Chapel, where Jack the Ripper killed the prostitutes in London. The name of a church. Y-Cha, the Monkey God, with her fury and fertility and her absolute weakness. They say the river runs white at times, like milk, it is part of Y-Cha. Whiteness. The white of bones strung along in her necklace.

  The white of the scoured woman, her featureless face covered with infection.

  Can any man exist who matches the implications of this?

  The Hero Who Skinned A Thousand Faces.

  And why?

  What does he intend with this madness, if he does still exist, if the stories are true?

  And why am I searching for him?

  And then she wrote:

  Greer’s eyes looking into me. Knowing about my father. Knowing because of a memory of hurt somehow etched into my own eyes.

  The excitement when he was looking out from the taxi.

  Like a bogeyman on holiday, a bag of sweeties in one hand, and the other, out to grab a child’s hand.

  Frailty and cruelty. Suffering as a gift.

  What he said, two halves of the same coin. Without one, the other could not exist. Capable of great suffering.

  White Chapel, and its surrounding wilderness, came to life just after midnight. The extremes of its climate: chilly at dawn, steamy from ten in the morning till eight or nine at night, and then hot, but less humid, as darkness fell, led to a brain-fever siesta between noon and ten o’clock at night. Then families awoke and made the night meal, baths were taken, love was made; all in preparation for the more sociable and bearable hours of one a.m. to about six or seven, when most physical labor, lit by torch and flare, was done, or when hunting the precious monkey and other creatures more easily caught just before dawn. Jane was not surprised at this. Most of the nearby cultures followed a similar pattern based on climate and not daylight. What did impress her was the silence of the place while work and play began.

  Mary-Rose had a small fire going just outside the doorway; the dull orange light of the slow-burning manure cast spinning shadows as Mary-Rose knelt beside it and stirred a pan. “Fried bread,” she said as Jane sat up from her mat. “Are you hungry?”

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “Five, six hours, maybe.”

  The frying dough smelled delicious. Mary-Rose had a jar of honey in one hand, which tipped, carefully, across the pan.

  Jane glanced through the shadows, trying to see if Rex was in the corner on his mat.

  “Your friend,” Mary-Rose said, “he left. He said he wanted to catch some local color. That is precisely what he said.”

  “He left his equipment,” Jane said.

  “Yes, I can’t tell you why. But,” Mary-Rose said, flipping the puffed circle of bread and then dropping it onto a thin cloth, “I can tell you something about the village. There are certain entertainments that are forbidden to women which many men who come here desire. Men are like monkeys, do you not think so? They frolic, and fight, and even destroy, but if you can entertain them with pleasure, they will put other thoughts aside. A woman is different. A woman cannot be entertained by the forbidden.”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that things are forbidden to women, anyway.”

  Mary-Rose shrugged. “What I meant, Miss Boone, is that a woman is the forbidden. Man is monkey, but woman is Monkey God.” She apparently didn’t care what Jane thought one way or another. Jane had to suppress an urge to smile, because Mary-Rose seemed so set in her knowledge of life, and had only seen the jungles of Y-Cha. She brought the bread into the shack and set it down in front of Jane. “Your friend, Rex, he is sick from some fever. But it is fever that drives a man. He went to find what would cool the fever. There is a man skilled with needles and medicines in the jungle. It is to this man that your friend has traveled tonight.”

  Jane said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Mary-Rose grinned. The small holes in her teeth had been filled with tiny jewels. “What fever drives you, Miss Jane Boone?”

  “I want to find him. Meritt. The White Devil.”

  “What intrigues you about him?”

  Jane wasn’t sure whether or not she should answer truthfully. “I want to do a book about him. If he really exists. I find the legend fascinating.”

  “Many legends are fascinating. Would someone travel as far as you have for fascination? I wonder.”

  “All right. There’s more. I believe, if he exists, if he is the legend, that he is either some master sociopath or something else. What I have found in my research of his travels is that the victims, the ones who have lived, are thankful of their torture and mutilation. It is as if they’ve been—I’m not sure—baptized or consecrated by the pain. Even the parents of those children—the ones who were skinned—even they forgave him. Why? Why would you forgive a man of such unconscionable acts?” Jane tasted the fried bread; it was like a doughnut. The honey that dripped across its surface stung her lips; but it wasn’t honey at all; it had a bitter taste to it. Some kind of herb mixed with sap?

  It felt as if fire ants were biting her lips, along her chin where the thick liquid dripped; her tongue felt large, clumsy, as if she’d been shot up with Novocain. She didn’t immediately think that she had been drugged, only that she was, perhaps, allergic to this food. She managed to say, “I just want to meet him. Talk with him,” before her mouth seemed inoperable, and she felt a stiffness to her throat.

  Mary-Rose’s eyes squinted, as if assessing this demand. She whispered, “Are you not sure that you do not seek him in order to know what he has known?” She leaned across to where the image of the household god sat on its wooden haunches. Not a monkey, but some misshapen imp. Sunken into the head of this imp, something akin to a votive candle. Mary-Rose lit this with a match. The yellow-blue flame came up small, and she cupped the idol in her hand as if it were a delicate bird.

  And then she reached up with her free hand and touched the edges of her lips. It looked as if she were about to laugh.

  “Miss Jane Boone. You look for what does not look for you. This is the essence of truth. And so you have found what you should run from, the hunter is become the hunted,” she said, and began tearing at the curve of her lip, peeling back the reddened skin, unrolling the flesh that covered her chin like parchment.

  Beneath this, another face. Unraveling like skeins of thread through some imperfect tapestry, the sallow cheeks, the aquiline nose, the shriveled bags beneath the eyes, even the white hair came out strand by strand. The air around her grew acrid with the smoke from the candle, as bits of ashen skin fluttered across its flame.

  A young man of nineteen or twenty emerged from beneath the last of the skin of Mary-Rose. His lips and cheeks were slick with dark blood, as if he’d just pressed his face into wine. “I am the man,” he said.

  The burning yellow-blue flame wavered, and hissed with snowflake-fine motes of flesh.

  Jane Boone watched it, unmoving.

  Paralyzed.

  Her eyes grew heavy. As she closed them, she heard Nathan Meritt clap his hands and say to someone, “She is ready. Take her to Sedri-Y-Cha-Sampon. It is time for Y-Cha-Pa.”

  The last part she could translate: Monkey God Night.


  She was passing out, but slowly. She could just feel someone’s hands reaching beneath her armpits to lift her. I am Jane Boone, an American citizen, a journalist, I am Jane Boone, you can’t do this to me, her feeble mind shouted while her lips remained silent.

  3

  Two years later, the saint lay down in the evening and tried to put the leper he had met that day out of his mind. The lips, so warm, drawing blood from his own without puncturing the skin.

  Or had it been her blood that he had drunk?

  Beside his simple cot was a basin and a pitcher of water. He reached over, dipping his fingers into it, and brought the lukewarm droplets up to his face.

  He was, perhaps, developing a fever.

  The city was always hot in this season, though, so he could not be certain. He wondered if his fear of the leper woman was creating an illness within his flesh. But the saint did not believe that he could contract anything from these people. He was only in Calcutta to do good. He was revered as a great teacher.

  The saint’s forehead broke a sweat.

  He reached for the pitcher, but it slipped from his sweaty hands and shattered against the floor.

  He sat up, and bent down to collect the pieces.

  The darkness was growing around him.

  He cut his finger on a porcelain shard.

  He squeezed the blood and wiped it across the oversized cotton blouse he wore to bed.

  He held the shard in his hand.

  There were times when even a saint held too much remembered pain within him.

  Desires, once acted upon in days of innocence and childhood, which now seemed dark and animal and howling.

  He brought the shard up to his lips, his cheek, pressing.

  In the reflecting glass of the window, a face he did not recognize, a hand he had not seen, scraping a broken piece of a pitcher up and down and up and down the way he had seen his father shaving himself when the saint was a little boy, the way he himself shaved, the way men could touch themselves with steel, leaning into mirrors to admire how close one could get to skin such as this. Had any ever gone so far beneath his skin?

  The saint tasted his blood.

  Tasted his skin.

  Began slicing clumsily at flesh.

  4

  Jane Boone sensed movement.

  She even felt the coolness of something upon her head. A damp towel?

  She was looking up at a thin, interrupted line of slate-gray sky emerging between the leaning trees and vines; she heard the cries of exotic birds; a creaking, as of wood on water.

  I’m in a boat, she thought.

  Someone came over to her, leaning forward. She saw his face. It was Jim, the boatman who had brought her from upriver. “Hello, Nettie,” he said, calling her by the nickname they’d laughed about before, “you are seeing now, yes? Good. It is nearly the morning. Very warm. But very cool in temple. Very cool.”

  She tried to say something, but her mouth wasn’t working; it hurt to even try to move her lips.

  Jim said, apparently noticing the distress on her face, “No try to talk now. Later. We on sacred water. Y-Cha carry us in.” Then he moved away. She watched the sky above her grow darker; the farther the boat went on this river, the deeper the jungle.

  She closed her eyes, feeling weak.

  Ice-cold water splashed across her face.

  “You go back to sleep, no,” Jim said, standing above her again, “trip is over.” He poled the boat up against the muddy bank. When he had secured it, he returned to her, lifting her from beneath her armpits. She felt as if every bone had been removed from her body. She barely felt her feet touch the ground as he dragged her up a narrow path. All she had the energy to do was watch the immense green darkness enfold about her, even while day burst with searing heat and light beyond them.

  When she felt the pins-and-needles feeling coming into her legs and arms, she had been set down upon a round stone wheel, laid flat upon a smooth floor. Several candles were lit about the large room, all set upon the yellowed skulls of monkeys, somehow attached to the walls. Alongside the skulls, small bits of leaf and paper taped or nailed or glued to the wall; scrawled across these, she knew from her experience in other similar temples, were petitions and prayers to the local god.

  On one of the walls, written in a dark ink that could only have been blood, were words in the local dialect. Jane was not good at deciphering the language.

  A man’s voice, strong and pleasant, said, “‘Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, I delight in your offering.’ It’s an incantation to the great one, the Y-Cha.”

  He emerged from the flickering darkness. Just as he had seemed beneath the skin of Mary-Rose, Nathan Meritt was young, but she recognized his face from his college photographs. He was not merely handsome, but he had a radiance that came from beneath his skin, as if something fiery lit him, and his eyes, blue and almost transparent, inflamed. “She is not native to this land, you know. She was an import from Asia. Did battle in her own way with Kali, and won this small acre before the village came to be. Gods are not as we think in the West, Jane, they are creatures with desires and loves and weaknesses like you or I. They do not come to us, or reveal themselves to us. No, it is we who approach them, we who must entertain them with our lives. You are a woman, as is the Y-Cha. Feelings that you have, natural rhythms, all of these, she is prey to, also.”

  Jane opened her mouth, but barely a sound emerged. Meritt put his finger to his lips. “In a little while. They used it to stun the monkeys.What that bread is dipped in. It’s called hanu, and does very little harm, although you may experience a hangover. The reason for the secrecy? I needed to meet you, Miss Boone, before you met me. You’re not the first person to come looking for me. But you’re different from the others who have come.”

  He stepped farther into the light, and she saw that he was naked. His skin glistened with grease, and his body was clean-shaven except for his scalp, from which grew long dark hair.

  Jane managed a whisper. “What about me? I don’t understand. Different? Others?”

  “Oh,” he said, a smile growing on his face, “you are capable of much suffering, Miss Boone. That is a rare talent in human beings. Some are weak, and murder their souls and bodies, and some die too soon in pain. Your friend Rex suffers much, but of the garden variety. I have already played with him. Don’t be upset. He had his needles and his drugs, and in return, he gave me that rare gift, that,” Meritt’s nostrils flared, inhaling, as if recalling some wonderful perfume, “moment of mastery. It’s like nothing else, believe me. I used to skin children, you know, but they die too soon, they whine and cry, and they don’t understand, and the pleasure they offer…”

  “Please,” Jane said. She felt strength seeping back into her muscles and joints. She knew she could run, but would not know to what exit, or where it would take her. She had heard about the temple having an underground labyrinth, and she didn’t wish to lose herself within it.

  But more than that, she didn’t feel any physical threat from Nathan Meritt.

  “You’re so young,” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “You look like you’re twenty. I never would’ve believed in magic, but…”

  He laughed, and when he spoke, it was in the measured cadences of Mary-Rose. “Skin? Flesh? It is our clothing, Miss Jane Boone, it is the tent that shelters us from the reality of life. This is not my skin, see.” He reached up and drew back a section of his face from the left side of his nose to his left ear, and it came up like damp leaves, and beneath it, the chalk white of bone. “It may conform to my bones, but it is another’s. It’s what I learned from her, from the Y-Cha. Neither do I have blood, Miss Boone. When you prick me, I don’t spill.”

  He seemed almost friendly; he came and sat beside her.

  She shivered in spite of the familiarity.

  “You mustn’t be scared of me,” he said in a rigid British accent, “we’re two halves of the same coin.”

  Jane Bo
one looked in his eyes and saw Greer there, a smiling, gentle Greer. The Greer who had funded her trip to White Chapel, the Greer who had politely revealed his interest in children.

  “I met them in Tibet, Greer and Lucy,” Meritt said, resuming his American accent. “He wanted children, we had that in common, although his interests, oddly enough, had more to do with mechanics than with intimacy. I got him his children, and the price he paid. Well, a pound or more of flesh. Two days of exquisite suffering, Jane, along the banks of a lovely river. I had some children with me, bought in Bangkok at one hundred dollars each. I let them do the honors. Layers of skin, peeled back, like some exotic rind. The fruit within was for me. Then the children, for they had already suffered much at Greer’s own hands. I can’t bear to watch children suffer more than a few hours. It’s not yet an art for them; they’re too natural.”

  “Lucy?”

  He grinned. “Ah, Lucy. I could crawl into Greer’s skin, but I enjoyed the game. She couldn’t tell the difference because she didn’t give a fuck. Our whole trip down the river, only Jim knew Greer was, that I was within him, but old Jim’s a believer. Sweet Lucy, the most dreadful woman from Manchester, and that’s saying a lot. I’ll dispose of her soon, though, but she won’t be much fun. Her life is her torture—anything else is redundant.”

  Jane wasn’t sure how much of this monologue to believe.

  She said, “And me? What do you intend to do?”

  Unexpectedly, he leaned into her, brushing his lips against hers but not kissing. His breath was like jasmine flowers floating on cool water. He looked into her eyes as if he needed something that only she could give him. He said softly, “That will be up to you. You have come to me. I am your servant.”

  He pulled away, stood, and turned his back to her. He went to the wall and lifted a monkey skull candle up. He held the light along the yellow wall.