The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “This one is drunk,” Sæhildr said, sniffing the air.

  “Very much so,” the sun-haired woman replied.

  “A drunkard slew the troll?”

  “She was sober that day. I think.”

  Sæhildr snorted and said, “Know that there was no bond but blood between my father and I. Hence, what need have I to seek vengeance upon his executioner? Though, I will confess, I’d hoped she might bring me some measure of sport. But even that seems unlikely in her current state.” She released the sleeping woman’s jaw, letting it bump roughly against the mule’s ribs, and stood upright again. “No, I think you need not fear for your lover’s life. Not this day. Besides, hasn’t the utter destruction of your village counted as a more appropriate reprisal?”

  The sun-haired woman blinked, and said, “Why do you say that, that she’s my lover?”

  “Liquor is not the only stink on her,” answered the sea troll’s daughter. “Now, deny the truth of this, my lady, and I may yet grow angry.”

  The woman from doomed Invergó didn’t reply, but only sighed and continued staring into the gravel at her feet.

  “This one is practically naked,” Sæhildr said. “And you’re not much better. You’ll freeze, the both of you, before morning.”

  “There was no time to find proper clothes,” the woman protested, and the wind shifted then, bringing with it the cloying reek of the burning village.

  “Not very much farther along this path, you’ll come to a small cave,” the sea troll’s daughter said. “I will find you there, tonight, and bring what furs and provisions I can spare. Enough, perhaps, that you may yet have some slim chance of making your way through the mountains.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dóta said, exhausted and near tears, and when the troll’s daughter made no response, the barmaid discovered that she and the mule and Malmury were alone on the mountain ledge. She’d not heard the demon take its leave, so maybe the stories were true, and it could become a fog and float away whenever it so pleased. Dóta sat a moment longer, watching the raging fire spread out far below them. And then she got to her feet, took up the mule’s reins, and began searching for the shelter that the troll’s daughter had promised her she would discover. She did not spare a thought for the people of Invergó, not for her lost family, and not even for the kindly old man who’d owned the Cod’s Demise and had taken her in off the streets when she was hardly more than a babe. They were the past, and the past would keep neither her nor Malmury alive.

  Twice, she lost her way among the boulders, and by the time Dóta stumbled upon the cave, a heavy snow had begun to fall, large wet flakes spiraling down from the darkness. But it was warm inside, out of the howling wind. And, what’s more, she found bundles of wolf and bear pelts, seal skins and mammoth hide, some sewn together into sturdy garments. And there was salted meat, a few potatoes, and a freshly killed rabbit spitted and roasting above a small cooking fire. She would never again set eyes on the sea troll’s daughter, but in the long days ahead, as Dóta and the stranger named Malmury made their way through blizzards and across fields of ice, she would often sense someone nearby, watching over them. Or only watching.

  Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash

  15/7/98

  No one here seems to mind very much that my French is atrocious. I begin to suspect it isn’t true, what everyone says about how Parisians sneer at and disdain and show contempt for Americans who mangle their language. Or I’ve been lucky. Or. Or, I don’t know. From my window, there’s an excellent view of Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, which I read in a guidebook was once Le Cimetière du Sud. All those white-stone monumented narrow houses, and the low conical tower, as if the dead need a lighthouse or castle keep or what have you. I read, too, stone from nearby quarries was heaped here into a spoil pile, and in the Seventeenth Century the area, before it was a boneyard, become known as Mount Parnasse: Tho’ their music here be mortal need the singer greatly care? Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter… The stone, that rubble pile of yore before the coming of Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, I believe to be hewn from out limestone beds sixty, seventy-five feet down below our feet. Stone that was seafloor ooze in Tertiary ages (?). The underground quarries are still there, below the feet in France. I’ve spent days walking between the rows. Days and days and days. We cannot walk there after dark, not in the summer, which is a shame, and perhaps some odd desecration. In my little black book, I write the names of the moldering interred (but there are yet many whom I have not visited). These I have: Baudelaire, Carrière, de Maupassant, Robert Desnos, Beckett, cherished St. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray. At Sartre Satyr Saint’s grave I leave tokens: coins, stones, a battered first-edition of L’âge de raison I scrounged from 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Shakespeare and Company. A bouquet of flowers for Mlle. de Beauvoir I stole from Queen Kiki de Montparnasse, and I think she’ll never miss the bundle of wilted roses and bracken.

  The old woman who lives across the hall asked if I find inspiration here. She knows enough English that we can converse in her broken English and not my broken French. She has false teeth and once was a singer. She takes pity on me, so I show her canvases I can’t finish. She brings bread and cheese sometimes, and I share wine. Je partage mon vin. I believe that’s not too far off the mark. We talk books and art and politics. We talk. I talk and she is kind enough to listen. Her hair is akin to wild grey moss, and she sometimes forgets to wear her teeth. Her eyes are the eyes of a young girl, and the color of agate. She says her name is Dorothée Lefbèvre, though I suspect she’s lying. Cannot say why. It hardly matters what she calls herself. Says she was born in 1917, and talks about the wars. I asked her, twice, to sit for me; each time she blushed and declined. We talk of aqueducts and crypts below churches. She doesn’t shy at morbidity. Perhaps we’ll make great friends, Dorothée Lefbèvre and I.

  In the mirror where I shave, my skin has looked better. It all catches up with me, though I thought that would be later rather than sooner. All men must think that, yes? Delusions of immortality. Something of the sort. Wrinkles and grey hair. Teeth not what once they were, nor as numerous; eyes dim and bloodshot the way you know they’ll never be clear again.

  Today I sit and stare at the canvas, the bird-headed demon gazing down upon all the world, gazing down in derision and indifference, doing the both simultaneously. I mix paint, and it dries before I commit a single brushstroke. I hate this one. I loathe it, but it will mean a check. Hence, I will trudge on to the muddy end. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair before the easel, which I never used to do. Or cannot recall having done. I should be out walking the streets, not sleeping in a chair before a ruined canvas. I’ve seen precious little of the precious city.

  I hear rumors of cataphiles, men and women who explore the ancient abscesses, sewers, les ossuaires, the galleries of forgotten Twelfth-Century quarries (carrières), subterranean lakes, and on and on. I should not be sitting here with this acrylic dead-end. There is nothing here to learn. I swear again I would cease these paintings if I had that option. I swear again they eat at my mind and soul and body, pick me apart like ravens, and I would have nothing more of them. Idiots talk of muses and inspiration, naïve words from lips of starry-eyed fools who see romance where there is little more than monotony and humiliation. When I am interviewed, I ought to say these things, but I never do; my agent holds his thumb across my throat, pressing down on my tongue. Buyers like to believe the artist labors in the joy of creation, not in despair. Not always wanting out, and ever willing to seek new manners of egress. They – the buyers – should sit dozing in my hard chair, prostrate in sleep before this hideous abortion of a painting, the ibis-crowned monster plucked from…from…I do not know where, but here it is all the same, isn’t it. I ought to set it aside, at least for a few days, if only to spite the market and my agent and the galleries back in the States or London.

  I should be in the museums – Musée national d’art moderne, Muséum natio
nal d’Histoire naturelle, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, id est. I should leave the city and take the train to Gévaudan (now, of course, Lozère. Haute-Loire), as I planned. It may be that Dorothée would accompany me, if I paid her fare. I did ask if she knows the story of La Bête du Gévaudan; she did, she does. She was surprisingly well versed in the tales. Or I was surprised at her knowledge, and the one thing might not equate to the other. She has traveled the Margeride. In her youth. In some facet of her youth, all those many decades past. I will ask her perhaps. Or I will stare down this painting. In truth, je m’en fou, as she would say. I should seek out the deep-delving troglodytic cataphiles and ask them to lead me down to all the private Hades. I should find the tomb of Henri Fantin-Latour and leave dead flowers (fleurs mortes?). I should seek out a street where pretty boys sell themselves and lose myself in flesh, theirs and mine.

  17/7/98

  Found him down on la Rue Saint-Denis (a/k/a rue des Saints Innocents et grant chaussée de Monsieur, Sellerie de Paris, rue de Franciade, et al) that First Century Roman slash of paving now so clogged with whores, male and female, though the latter holds so little interest for me these days. He, who spoke not a word of English – I do not count the stray yes and no and various profanities and brand names, no, those I do not count at all – and I think he was surprised that I wanted more than a quick blow in an alleyway. I brought him back to the flat, and fucked him good and proper, then paid him extra to pose for me.

  There’s a heap of him still on the floor, a heap of charcoal approximation of that pinched face and lean ass and eyes that were proud despite their sorry lot. But I found him, and little more matters. He had a name, of course. Still does, unless a name thief is lose in the Quartier Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, some beast that slinks the blacktop and storefronts in search of the praenomen and cognomen of boy whores. He might have been sixteen, seventeen, but no older. Had he been, I’d not have paid so much. I’d not have paid at all, but continued in my search. He called himself Gautier. I bent him over my bed and splayed open his ass for my starving cock. He made no sound at all. None. No complaint from my tapin (isn’t that the current slang?), not like those whining boys in Munich and, also, yes, that one especial trækkerdreng in Copenhagen. In whose mouth I stuffed an overripe pear rather than bear the noises he made.

  Gautier left before dawn. I said I would try to find him again sometime, one night or the next. He shrugged and left me alone.

  Left me here with my stinking sins, taking sins away and leaving me with my greater damnations, these hideous paints and brushes, all fire and brimstone and cold wastes and yes, yes, das Fegefeuer. I haven’t slept. I’ve had too many cups of coffee to drive back the sleep, which is the coiled hive of dreams and almost nothing more. Not rest, and that’s for fucking sure. No rest now in more years than I have fingers. Coffee, though, and nicotine, amphetamines, tiny ampoules of ammonia for desperate moments. How can I not be blessed with simple insomnia?

  18/7/98

  The stars above cathedrals are shameless things, no less wicked than the leering, tongue-lolling gargoyles crouched by the vicious architects of Notre Dame de Paris and the Cathedral Saint-Etienne de Meaux. Only, those distant bodies in roiling rotation are so infinitely more truthful than the horrors of the Galerie des Chimères, dream gallery, nightmare palisade of godly lies and sacred intimidations. Stars have no need of intimidation, which makes them mightier than all the godheads nightmared by mere humanity. You, Monsignor Shitwit, you paint me a demon so voracious as a red giant or Sol, or a Tetragrammaton to match the electron-degenerate matter of a white dwarf, and then, then we’ll talk of hells and heavens. I lay on my back in a forest flanking the Seine, though that must have been so very long ago: mammoth- and lion-haunted forests (though neither of these did I glimpse, for I am afforded no such mild phantasmagoria). I lay in the dew-damp grass, and the stars whirled above me, weaving celestial labyrinths with no beginnings and no endings, mazes no one enters or escapes – des labyrinthes sans sorties, des labyrinthes sans entrées, so designated in my dictionary-shredded mockery. I’d have looked away, but that thought never once occurred to my sleeping mind.

  Van Gogh never saw a sky like that, not in the deepest folds of his epileptic, absinthe-fueled anti-reveries. Nor Kupka, nor, nor, nor Munch with all his Madonna and spermatozoa. The Dome of Heaven whirled above me, condemning kaleidoscope that knows my every transgression because it looks on every night and, in daylight, passes notes with the perfidious sun. Back here we come to stars. Plenty of gods et goddesses are stars: Helios, Hyperion, Ra, the seven Vedic Adityas. The dome wheeled above me without wings, though I feared those absent wings that would beat with no earthly thunder in the vacuum. Beating, they would be soundless as the dead.

  The sky is black-blue indigo white adamantine alabaster blackest of all blacks. Blazing bright and yet absolutely, irredeemably tenebrous.

  There is terrible purpose in the wheel.

  This I saw, with sleeping eyes wide, and no man nor woman may gainsay these observations, not without showing themselves liars, and ignorant liars at that. I lay there forever, until she said my name, and I turned to the pale naked girl on the grass not too far away. Her knees pulled up beneath her chin, hiding sex and breasts from view, modesty or habit or retreat from the chilly night air. I didn’t need to ask her name; I’ve known all her names almost all my life. “Not wise to stare so long,” she said, and smiled, showing all those teeth of hers packed in like sardine pegs on enamel and ripping incisor/canine/premolar ferocity. “Were I you, I’d look away.”

  I told her I already had looked away, to see her, instead.

  “You stare too long at everything no sane man ought ever glimpse for a moment.”

  “You never have thought me a sane man.”

  “I never have,” she agreed.

  So there she sat, in the lotus folds of all her names, but let’s be content with the one – Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. No, never mind. One will never ever do her. Addend Little Red Cap, then. And Riding Hood. Und Rotkäppchen. Goldenhood. Saint Margaret of Antioch. Spin them all about her as the sky spins, for now unsighted, above the Seine and the land before the coming of Paris.

  “You’ll not go to Gévaudan,” she said with great finality.

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing left there for you to see, Albert. They slew her long ago. Cartel cut down La Bête twice a hundred and fifteen years ago. Her bones went to dust in Versailles.

  I know she’s confusing, conflating, two versions of the tale, that in which the beast is slain by François Antoine and that other, in which she was slain by Jean Chastel. It was Antoine sent the corpse to the Court of Louis XV, not Chastel. I don’t correct her. Never have I corrected the girl, nude but for her woolen crimson and her wet black nose. She talks on while the sky wheels above the countryside: Jean Chastel’s great red mastiff, maybe the beast’s sire, maybe Chastel dressing the misbegotten hybrid in an armored boar skin and setting it upon peasants to slake his own perverse inclinations.

  I listen, as always I listen when she speaks. Mostly, she wants to be certain I don’t make the trip to Gévaudan, not even if Dorothée accompanies me.

  I go back to watching that maelstrom sky, because I have guessed it’s one of the missing elements in the unfinished painting. It has more to teach me than the red-capped bitch. It teaches me a labyrinth is not a place where one becomes disoriented and lost. It is a place into which one is born and may never escape.

  The sun is setting when I wake.

  19/7/98

  The morning post brought an envelope from Manhattan, from that cunt shitbird fuck Larry fucking Tannahill. I’d have thought ending his salary would have ended his attentions. No. He sends a clipping, which I attach here (fuck knows why, that too), though the business with the film is well and truly over and done. He tore it from a magazine somewhere. It was not scissor-clipped, but torn:

  Excerpt from “L’homme qui a assassiné Arthur Rackham:
Une entrevue avec Albert Perrault,” published in L’Oeil (Avril 1989, No. 452), by J. S. Molyneux (translated from the original French by J. S. Molyneux):

  L’Oeil: The “Little Red Riding Hood” sequence, for example? It was not what you had envisioned?

  Perrault: No, it was not. It was so completely outlandish, because the director wanted a crude, outlandish film. He would look at my sketches and paintings, the sculptures I did with Rob Bottin, and say, “Yes, yes, that’s a good place to start, but see, we can take it so much farther.” And that poor actress. XXXXX XXXXXXXXX, I think that was her name. She had worked on something very similar with Neil Jordan, and so XXXXXXX insisted upon her, though I thought she was somewhat too old for the role. Six hours in makeup for this scene, and I think it was four consecutive days she had to go through that, because they couldn’t get a take XXXXXXX was happy with.

  L’Oeil: I’ve seen your sketches, and, in those, the wolf’s penis doesn’t look like a sea cucumber.

  Perrault: Of course, it doesn’t. Because that was not my design. That was something that Bottin and his crew were asked to do, all their creation. But it is a perfect example of how outrageous XXXXXXX wanted this film to be, how he kept missing the mark because he wouldn’t follow the work they were paying me to do. I’d wanted the “Riding Hood” sequence to be so much simpler, more eloquent, let the audience’s imagination do more work, instead of relying heavily on prosthetics. But, no, XXXXXXX would have none of it, and it made him angry that I would not agree that his way was better.