Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  With our pilot missing, the surrounding shrubs compressed into crouching shadows, dwarfed by the walls of the Castle—I felt on edge, yet I also felt challenged by the situation, as if I were accustomed to an adventurous life and not a wilting academic. Instead of being put off by the babble around me, my normal reaction to groups, I eagerly interacted with the others (excepting Nubia) and, when it came time to retire, I was sorry to abandon the camaraderie I’d found around the campfire. I had not been in my tent long, reading by battery lamp, when Nubia pushed aside the flap. She had on baggy shorts and a T-shirt, and was carrying the box of documents I had retrieved from the Temple. Without preamble, she asked if I had examined them.

  “Briefly,” I said, offended by her abrupt entrance. “Why?”

  “I want you to see something.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  She sat beside my sleeping bag, opened the box and held out a yellowed piece of paper. I gave an annoyed sigh and sat up. Someone had scribbled variant spellings of two words in ink on the face of the document, the most common being half-a-dozen repetitions at the bottom of the page, as if this were the spelling that had been settled on: Kirikh’quru Krokundor.

  I gave an indifferent shrug. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I Googled the words and their elements, but none of the results relate to anything that has a connection to St. Gotthard.”

  “It was probably someone goofing around.”

  She handed me a second page, a contract signed by someone named A. Kuenzy—but Kuenzy had first signed another name to the page, one he or she had crossed out yet which was still recognizable: Kirikh’quru Krokundor. The document was dated August 16, 1928, the year in which the Moravians had broken off contact with the outer world.

  “Now we know who was goofing around,” I said. “The guy must have spaced while signing the contract.”

  “Could be,” Nubia said. “It doesn’t make any linguistic sense—it reminds me of the names my kid invents for characters in his role-playing games.”

  “You have a kid?”

  “Gerardo.” She tucked a stray curl behind her ear and smiled. “I adopted him several years ago. He’s staying with my mother.”

  This evidence of humanity (she had never before expressed any maternal feelings) softened my attitude toward her. As if this erosion of anger had cleared wax from my ears, I heard the scuttling of nocturnal creatures in the brush, the wind keening fitfully, all the night sounds. She began outlining our duties for the following morning, not with her usual brusque tone, but putting the schedule out there for me to approve. She glanced at me now and then, and not to see whether I was paying attention. She seemed reluctant to look away. Her nipples were erect, pushing against the fabric of the T-shirt, and there was a flush on her cheeks. Occasionally she touched my hand. Warmth suffused my body, causing me to feel dull and drugged, and I felt a stirring in my groin. I had it in mind to tip her face up to be kissed, but then remembered how deeply I despised her—I was amazed that I could have forgotten even for a second. Though I continued to have an acute awareness of her body, her scent, I decided that my arousal must be vestigial, the remnant of an old chemistry I was unable to purge because she had denied me a proper resolution. I wanted to make love to her no less, but it would have been the mother of all grudge-fucks. She may have picked up on a subtle change in the emotional climate, for her manner grew brisk and, after a minute or so, acting flustered, she returned to her tent, leaving me, as she had years before, in a state of frustration.

  * * * *

  The next morning I went to wake Taylor, thinking to get a head start on what promised to be a grueling day; but he was not in his tent. I speculated with a degree of amusement as to whose tent he might be in; then I grabbed a machete and headed for the Pleasure Dome in accordance with Nubia’s schedule, knowing she would send him along in due course. Mildewed maroon carpeting covered the wide stairway leading up from the bottom floor and the bas-reliefs on the plaster walls were in good repair. They depicted men and women engaged in foreplay and, as the stair wound upward, in sexual congress. I wondered how the Moravians had related to these images. They were not prudes, but I doubted they would have been comfortable with them. I wondered, too, not for the first time, at Remarque’s motives in deeding St. Gotthard to the sect. Had he intended it as an affront to their sensibilities? Had he hoped the reliefs would have a debasing effect? And if the latter were so, had his tactic succeeded?

  At the top of the stairs were double doors; past the doors, steps led down into the garden whose vegetation yielded an unexpectedly clean, dry smell. I heard rustling in the undergrowth, as of rodents. Citrus trees and bougainvillea and bamboo flourished amid a tangle of anonymous shrubs, and I saw something white that might have been one of the statues mentioned by Taylor; but what held my attention were the glass panels of the dome, at least half of them intact. Lead mullions sectioned the panels into irregular shapes and these shapes had varying degrees of opacity. The mullions were thin, difficult to make out against the gray backdrop of morning, making it appear that translucent clouds had invaded a circular patch of sky and were shifting about, a trippy effect that brought to mind the early stages of a psychotropic drug experience. As if the sight had infected my eyes, patches of opacity shifted across the leaves as I pushed deeper into the garden.

  I followed the path that Taylor had cut the previous day—the severed branches still oozed sap—and heard an unmistakably human outcry. It occurred to me that whoever had scattered flowers by the broken fountain might be the source of the cry. I eased forward and heard a softer cry. Through a gap in the leaves I spotted Claudia Pozzobon reclining on a bench of white stone, her shorts and panties about her ankles, her top pushed up to expose her gelatinous breasts. She rubbed her fingers between her legs, one hand braced on the moss-fettered thigh of a statue, a subhuman figure with tusk-like teeth—it leaned over the bench, as if deeply interested in what Claudia was doing. I had a gynecological view of the proceedings and my initial thought was to withdraw; yet I kept watching, attentive as a hound, for several seconds. I might have stayed longer if Claudia had not spoken.

  “Come mi bollo!” she said in a fierce whisper. “Mas! Como eso! Ay, mas!”

  Half-believing that she’d spotted me, I retreated. I had the suspicion that someone was watching me watch her and this increased my pace. I paused on the landing, worried that if she had seen me, she might tell the others. I decided to wait for her, to pretend that I was coming up the stairs. When she burst through the doors, she displayed no surprise on seeing me and asked if I’d been spying on her. I didn’t think I could pull off a lie.

  “Look,” I said. “I heard a noise, I was curious. I’m sorry. It was only for a second.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “If I caught you at it, I’d probably peek, too. Are you sure you weren’t there longer?”

  “I wasn’t spying on you! All right?”

  “Whatever. I could have sworn someone was watching me the whole time.”

  “If you thought someone was watching, why didn’t you stop?”

  “I liked the idea.” She gave me a sidelong look. “It must just have been those creepy statues, eh?”

  “This is no place I’d choose to get friendly with myself.”

  “How old are you? Thirty? For such a young guy, you’re extremely repressed.” She put a hand on her hip. “I was horny. I’m sharing a tent with Macyory and she’s gay. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.”

  “I thought...”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were gay.”

  “Sometimes... but I’m not attracted to Macyory.”

  “But you’re attracted to Nubia.”

  “Are you kidding? She’s too old for me. We flirt, but that’s just girl stuff. Did Taylor say something? Is that where you’re hearing this? He’s all obsessed—he thinks everybody is after her. Maybe he’s right.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t get what it
is about her. Men lose their minds when she’s around.”

  I made no comment.

  “You too, eh?” said Claudia.

  “Here we are, in the midst of all this beauty and mystery, and we’re having a stupid high school conversation.”

  “What should we talk about? Beauty and mystery?” Claudia’s mouth tightened with disdain. “Bor-ing!”

  * * * *

  At mid-morning a heavy rain sluiced over the surface of the dome, blurring its cloudy definition, and Taylor joined me in hacking and slashing at vines and branches. I told him I’d stopped by his tent and asked where he had been—he said he must have been taking a piss. He was in a sullen mood and we worked without speaking, managing to clear two groupings of statues and benches. One statue was of a nude faceless woman with anatomically precise musculature, its hands outspread as if bestowing a blessing upon the bench beneath. The other grouping consisted of three statues and the remains, of a wooden couch sufficiently wide to support four or five reclining bodies. The statues were half-again life-size, unfinished... or else their subjects had been unfinished, partial faces emerging from smooth white stone, hunched over the couch as if preparing to snatch up someone with a club-like three-fingered hand. This unsettling tableau firmed up my notion that the theme of the garden had something to do with a kinship between Eros and terror. It must have been, I thought, a kink of Remarque’s. I had done some research on him before leaving on the trip and had found a sketchy biography, mentions of his business dealings, his promiscuity, his friendship with various disreputable characters, actors and criminal types, but nothing that commented on him in depth.

  Around noon, leaving Taylor at work, I went to get something to eat. Nubia and Macyory were sitting in Nubia’s tent, peering glumly out at the rain through the open flap. They had made sandwiches. The tent was spacious, with room for a writing desk and a cot, on which the two women sat, and I pulled the desk chair about so I could face them. To piss off Nubia, I asked if I was interrupting something. “No!” she said crabbily. I plucked a sandwich from the table and told them what we had found.

  “Taylor’s still hacking away,” I said. “But I think all we’ll find is more of the same. My time would be better spent trying to get into the tower. Or the basement of the Pleasure Dome.”

  “Abreu is still missing,” said Nubia. “I sent the sergeant to find him.”

  Sitting next to each other emphasized their Indian blood. They might have been cousins joined in a depressed unity.

  “Are we in trouble?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” Nubia said, and Macyory added, “Nothing’s definite, but it’s not good news.”

  “We’re in trouble, then?”

  Nubia made a noise like a cat sneezing. “Do you have to always seize upon the worst case scenario?”

  Macyory ran a hand consolingly along her leg, leaving it resting on her upper thigh; then she laid her head on Nubia’s shoulder and shut her eyes. This casual intimacy intrigued me.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Nubia, speaking more to Macyory than to me.

  I removed the wrapping from my sandwich and lifted a corner of the bread—a BLT. I had a bite and said, “Suppose Abreu and Perdomo don’t come back. Wouldn’t it be wise to have a contingency plan?”

  “If we don’t report in, they’ll send another helicopter,” said Nubia.

  “Oh, yeah!” I said with heavy sarcasm. “We can depend on the Venezuelan army to act with customary swift efficiency.

  “What’s your point?”

  “No point.” I had another bite. “Simply wondering if you had a plan other than to run screaming into the forest.”

  The rain fell harder, sending up splashes like ricochets from the ground outside, drumming on the tent, causing me to raise my voice.

  “Where’s Claudia?” I asked.

  “In the Castle,” Macyory said. “She’s trying to put that face together.”

  She and Nubia interlaced their fingers. I withheld comment, a rare moment of restraint. After finishing my sandwich, I unwrapped a second one. As I ate I took note of Nubia’s listlessness, assuming this was due to worries about Abreu’s continued absence; yet the women seemed less concerned with the captain than with one another. Macyory made eye contact with Nubia whenever possible and arranged her features into an imploring look when she succeeded. I decided to let them work out their problem, whatever it was, and made for the Temple, thinking I’d have a go at the locked door; but my energy was low and I made for the Castle instead.

  Gray light from the windows dressed the room in a thick dusk. Claudia was on all fours beside the broken fountain; she had cleared a space on the floor and upon it, lit by a battery lamp, lay the product of her labors: a marble face less than half-complete. Part of the throat was joined to a section of the jaw, and a portion of the opposite cheek was fitted to a second eye. She had assembled most of the forehead, too, and had placed a piece of the nose underneath them. Without a mouth and chin, it was hard to determine whether the face was male or female. Arranged on a patch of rotted, reddish carpet, it had a barbaric quality.

  “What do you think?” she asked, coming to her knees.

  “Nubia will be happy. It’ll make a good cover illustration as is.”

  Claudia regarded her work, tipping her head to one side. “It’s a young girl or a boy with feminine eyes. See how large they are? How the lashes are accentuated?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Of course the mouth could make it look more adult or more masculine. Now it looks almost elfin.”

  A feeling of unease stole over me. The room, with its moldy stench and mildewed wall hangings, the tables and stained leather chairs, and the faint sound of the fountain... Nothing moved, but I had a sense that something had been moving a split-second before, or else it had slipped away beyond a dimensional gate and was peering at us still.

  “I can’t find any of the mouth,” Claudia said. “Do you really think this will satisfy Nubia?”

  “Hmm-hmm.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This place creeps me out. Yeah, she’ll be delighted.”

  She stood and dusted herself off. “I need a break.”

  I continued to search for evidence of things not seen. Claudia stepped close to me; the tips of her breasts grazed my shirtfront.

  “Want to take a break with me?” she asked.

  I had no doubt what she meant and I started to say it would be inappropriate and I didn’t get involved with students and I didn’t feel that way, the stock responses; but then, suddenly, I did feel that way. Her scent and her stare melted my inhibitions. The thinnest strand of false morality held me back.

  “Don’t you think I’m too old for you?” I asked, making a feeble stab at humor.

  “Let’s find out.” I hesitated and she made a peevish sound. “Do I have to convince you?”

  “It’s not that. I don’t want to be walked in on.”

  “There’s a room in back with a couch that’s fairly clean,” she said pertly. “Clean enough, anyway.”

  * * * *

  Sex with Claudia was the sort of sex that gives you a hangover. It lacked all but a scant emotional component, yet we shared a peculiar clinical unity. I knew everything she wanted and she seemed unerringly to know my wants as well. As we progressed the sex grew rougher, but this was in keeping with our needs. She nipped my neck and chest, locked her teeth in my shoulder and raked my sides with her nails. I believe I marked her as well. Afterward I smelled like her and she smelled like me. She offered a perfunctory kiss and went back to work. I returned to camp (noticing that the flap of Nubia’s tent was closed) and lay down on my sleeping bag. Usually I was scrupulous about using protection, but the fact that I hadn’t used any with Claudia worried me not in the least. I dozed off thinking about her body.

  I woke around four. The rain had stopped, Nubia’s tent flap was still down and the sun was trying to break through. I
dug an apple out of stores and ate it sitting in a camp chair beside dead coals of the previous night’s fire. The sun gave up, the temperature dropped. It promised to be a chilly night. Nubia came out of her tent. She pulled up a chair, but said nothing. Her hair was mussed and she looked groggy. We talked about the book and then she asked what I’d been up to that day.