by Gretchen Rix
And if either of them found the chip from her tooth before the old man down by the pool interfered, she (or maybe he) could become the thirty-two through smashing the rest of Gymkhana’s teeth out of her mouth and eating them. Just like she’d enthusiastically done to the thirty-one people that had come before.
The girl in the blood room explained all this to Mike in fits and starts as she untied the rest of him and helped rub his arms and legs back into commission. “You can’t eat teeth,” he said, rearing back from her sharp little mouth so near his own as she worked.
“Sure you can,” she said. “We ground them up. Your girlfriend Gymkhana ate the first tooth the day her wisdom teeth came through. They let me watch. I saw it all. That was the one. After she got to the ten they tried to make me leave, but I wouldn’t. The ten was a boy, screaming to high heaven, I tell you. Gymkhana cut that sucker’s teeth out. Made him watch her ground them and eat them, too.”
Mike’s reality changed forever at that moment. Gymkhana saw it in his face. The girl in the blood room saw it too and abruptly sat back on her haunches. “Don’t you be looking at me like that,” she said.
“You killed all these people!” he exclaimed. “For their teeth!”
“Not me, boy,” the girl-in-waiting objected. “It was her. Gymkhana. I only watched.”
“For their teeth?” he repeated. “Why? Why would anyone do that? Why would Gymkhana do that?”
“To be the one who takes the old grandfather’s place. It’s always been that way. It was supposed to be Celeste, but she couldn’t do it. Then it be Gymkhana. Sure thought she’d go the distance, but we could tell she was getting ready to bypass you. Sent me up to stop it. I didn’t mean to knock her tooth out.”
“You threw a knife at her head. What did you think would happen?”
“Meant to kill her dead,” she replied tonelessly. “Now she’s like a rattlesnake in a hen house. We’ve done spent too much time talking. Get a move on. Gymkhana’s more dangerous now.”
Neither of them realized that Gymkhana was watching from the bedroom. Was that girly girl planning to be the next thirty-two, she wondered; and if so, was it Mike she planned to take or Gymkhana herself? She must know she’d broken her tooth; was she stringing Mike along for fun? Celeste suddenly burst forth in indignation. “He’s ours,” she whispered hoarsely.
“What do you expect me to do about it,” Gymkhana replied without interest. Her time was almost up. That girl out there had plans, but what were they? In a bit what they called “the thirty-minute rule” would be up and Gymkhana’s chipped tooth would make her ineligible for the ceremonial uprooting, not that she should expect to get out of this with her life because of it.
Act or be acted upon. Gymkhana smiled as she remembered her daddy’s advice. Act or be acted upon he always said. Being the thirty-two was out of the question now. They weren’t going to let her go, either, not knowing what she knew and having done what she had done. There was no back way out of this apartment; there was only the front door and the windows on either side of it. That girl had called her a rattlesnake, hadn’t she? Gymkhana smiled with narrowed eyes. She’d show them rattlesnake.
She stepped fully out of the bedroom. Both Mike and the girl froze and looked at her. “Too late girly girl,” Gymkhana taunted her counterpart. “I’m damaged. Can’t use me, you can’t.”
Swiftly she glanced at Mike, then back to the girl. “Made up your mind yet?” she asked her, attempting to rattle the other into a fatal error. “Think you can take him down by yourself?” But when neither of them answered her, Gymkhana wondered if she was misreading the situation. Was the girl planning to bolt? Even to take Mike with her? Did this young girl have the brains to use her as a decoy and make a run for it, leaving Gymkhana behind to face the consequences?
Gymkhana continued to move in on them, talking softly, all friendly-like, getting closer by the second. She could see plans spinning in the girl’s eyes and she could see the return of fear in her boyfriend’s. Herself, she no longer had any reason to fear; her path was mapped plain as day. Let’s see which way the cards have fallen, she decided.
As Gymkhana prowled closer to the two in the blood room, the girl-in-waiting evidently made her choice. Standing up to her full height, she backed herself into Mike and spread her arms out in front of him, palms out. She couldn’t have told Gymkhana to stop more plainly if she had commanded it in words. Gymkhana laughed. Feinting to the right, she neatly unbalanced the girl as Mike took a step backward to turn and reach for the window blinds.
“Oh, they be coming pretty soon,” Gymkhana assured him. “You think you can knock them all down, the state you’re in? Sure you don’t want to just give up and let me take those pearly whites of yours? Won’t do me no good no more, but your new lady friend, she might use them. Did she tell you that?”
Mike looked full into her face, something she had not expected at this stage in the game. Fear was still visible in his stance and in his eyes, but he faced her like a man. Celeste poked at Gymkhana’s mind. “He’s ours,” she reminded her, “yours and mine.”
“She won’t do that,” Mike said.
Gymkhana fixed him with her stare. Rattlesnake, she thought. Be the rattlesnake. Her eyes narrowed. The girl still stood guard over her old boyfriend. “Celeste wouldn’t do it,” Gymkhana said. “She died for you.”
Both Mike and the girl continued to back away from her.
“I wouldn’t have done it either,” Gymkhana confessed, the entity Celeste taking over her face briefly with a grisly grin. “Was bypassing you already when she busted in,” she continued. “Three makes three,” she said in surprise. “She wasn’t going to take you neither. What mojo you got, Mike, that gets you the golden ticket?”
Mesmerized, the pair made the mistake of watching her eyes and following her voice rather than watching her hands. Gymkhana pounced, right arm driving upwards into the girl’s unprotected face. The set of pliers barely concealed in her palm connected solidly with her mouth, knocking her left front tooth out and clear to the front door, leaving a trail of blood sifting down through the refrigerated air.
Gymkhana did not stop to admire her work on the girl, but brutally walked right over her back, to Mike. She slapped him on the jaw with all her force. At least two teeth shattered; she saw flecks of enamel sticking to his lips and coursing down his chin with the blood.
“Now we’re three,” she announced, waving the pliers in Mike’s face. “None of us have the thirty-two teeth and never will again. None of us can be the thirty-two. We be the Musketeers and help each other out.”
She saw a flicker of hope reach Mike’s eyes, but the girl reeling near the door stayed away, not responding to Gymkhana’s suggestions but muttering in a monotonous voice something that sounded like “dentures”.
“He wears dentures,” the injured girl near the door suddenly shouted.
Gymkhana staggered, did not understand why she was poleaxed and tried to wrap her suddenly wool-filled brain around the idea. “Who wears dentures?” she asked, finally.
“The grandfather wears dentures,” the girl mumbled, crawling back into Gymkhana’s personal space.
Gymkhana still did not understand. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “He was the thirty-two. He had to have his own perfect teeth. How…”
Against all expectations and despite his injuries, Mike began to laugh. “But he does,” he said finally, between painful fits of hilarity. “He does! I’ve seen him in the dentist’s office when he had his teeth in a plastic box. You people are doing this all for nothing,” he cried.
“No,” Gymkhana protested. “That can’t be.” She shook her head from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no!”
The girl stood up and unceremoniously took the blooded pliers from Gymkhana’s frozen hand. “How’d you like it if I knocked the rest of your damned teeth down your throat, Gym?” she threatened. “It be no more than you deserve. Start thinking us a way out of this!”
&n
bsp; “Stop it,” Mike demanded. “We’re all going to die here. Make your peace with God.” He abruptly flicked the window blind back in place. “They’re coming.”
Gymkhana unconsciously grasped the crucifix. This brought back Celeste who made Gymkhana nod her head in agreement. “No way out,” the Celeste voice cackled. “All for nothing, Gym. Didn’t you ever wonder why grandfather always ended up being the thirty-two? Again and again. Always. Before me there was Mary, and before Mary it was Beneficent. We all got made incidental and then he got to keep on going. Then he got you started on it.”
“I never thought,” Gymkhana said. “He’s just always been there and I never thought anything of it.”
During the past year Gymkhana had tortured and murdered thirty-one people, getting to where she was now. She had torn their teeth out with pliers, broken their teeth away with hammers, and smashed their mouths in with whatever came to hand. She had cut their heads off, shot their faces in, and cut their teeth out with a knife.
Gymkhana had pulverized their teeth into a paste and eaten them. She had crushed their teeth into a powder and drunk them down with mescal. And she had swallowed their teeth whole with a chaser of tomato juice when she was too lazy to do otherwise.
This was what her family did, had always done, traveling from one big city to the other down the southern coast and back, staying only as long as necessary. The uprooting gave them purpose, an identity like no other travelers. Those who had heard of them moved out the minute they moved in.
Gymkhana knew she should have felt badly about what she had become, but she didn’t. She’d wanted that old man’s oryx hat on her head (Nike cap, Celeste interjected) ever since the first ceremony they’d let her see, and nothing about the path she’d taken to get this far had bothered her except their use of Mike. Now she knew what she had to do.
She got to the door in three strides and threw it open. The stairs to the second level were crowded with her relatives coming up; they looked like a giant centipede forcing its way ever upward. In their eyes Gymkhana saw reflections of everyone she had ever killed.
Without turning her head, Gymkhana knew that Mike and the girl were right behind her, ready to do what she did, knowing full well the three of them would die today, knowing full well that the old coot, last in line at the bottom of the stairs and grinning up at them, would go on and on, spelling them with his stories and ceremony, fooling everyone with his nasty animal hat and his perfect dentures.
Act or be acted upon, her daddy always said. He wasn’t there, thank God, she thought, though he had been one of Celeste’s victims. She didn’t see her mother coming up after her either. God provides. She wasn’t sure she could do what she had to do if her mother had been coming up those stairs after her.
“Run!” she screamed. “Run!”
Her voice froze those climbing the stairs for just enough time. Gymkhana drew upon Celeste and filled her lungs for one final primal scream, then let it loose into their lustful faces.
The girl pushed past and rushed to the right. After the briefest of hesitations, Mike pushed past and ran to the left. Gymkhana didn’t waste time thinking about them, but threw herself bodily into the air and down the stairs into the sharp teeth and tearing nails of the family clawing its way to its thirty-two.
The weight and fury of her flattened the ones she landed on. But it wasn’t enough to stop the rest. Her awareness of Celeste was what she lost first. As she chewed into one of the uncle’s arms and ripped out a chunk of his meat, Gymkhana felt momentarily triumphant. Then someone unceremoniously jerked her head back to expose her throat.
Only thirty-one, she thought abruptly, dismayed beyond imagining. I was going to be the thirty-…
Later, Geea and Mike, who had huddled behind the apartment complex among the dumpsters for an hour, came out to check on her. The noises from the stairs had subsided long since, but they waited an additional thirty minutes. They still weren’t easy when they walked out and converged there; Geea’s arms twitched and her steps were unsteady, Mike could hardly breathe.
What was left of Gymkhana decorated the stairway from the top landing clear down to the first and second steps from the bottom. What was recognizably human was her teeth. Mike closed his eyes against the sight while Geea keened softly, but she also began separating and collecting the teeth from the grue.
“Thirty-one and a half,” she told him. Head down, Mike refused to look at her or at them, but she forced the bloody teeth on him. “She died for you,” Geea told him. “Least you can do is take care of what she left.”
With a calculated shrug Mike pocketed what Geea had saved of Gymkhana. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Geea fingered her damaged mouth and stared at Mike’s mashed-up face. An odd sense of satisfaction rose through her soul; Gymkhana was dead and she was still alive, and she had Mike for her own as well. Their injuries were nothing a good cosmetic dentist couldn’t fix. And they also had the thirty-one perfect teeth. With a wry jerk of her damaged lip, she corrected herself. “Thirty-one and a half.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”
Mike jiggled the teeth in his pocket and followed her out into the parking lot. Then, as she led him away from the site of Gymkhana’s last stand, one by one he tossed her teeth out into the gravel and never looked back.
“Ain’t no one died for me,” he declared to the new girl’s quickly receding back as he followed her home. “Wait up,” he called.
THE END
ALSO BY GRETCHEN RIX
Coming soon, another short story: The Taking of Rhinoceros 456, an offbeat fantasy/mystery short about what really happens at the zoo after you leave.
SNIPPET
By the time Steve got to the abominable snowman habitat and his own sleeping quarters in the next cage, he’d slowed to a limp. At the zoo entrance he got some of his questions answered.
There was a hole in the gate.
A rhinoceros was missing.
And the alarm had gone off when the rhino had flattened the gate and calmly walked out with some army guy.
COMING SOON
Arroyo, a pulp adventure Western horror novel set in 1893 Texas. Available in the fall of 2011.
AVAILABLE NOW
Something different, a romance novel The Cowboy’s Baby
EXCERPT
“Now, just what am I going to do with you three miscreants?” the woman asked him, looking down.
It seemed to him he looked back a long distance before getting to her face. Cassandra Lennon, he thought, was no longer the beauty Marcia Dowson had described to him, but she did indeed look a little like a cat.
Tanned skin the color of dirt, a weatherworn face crisscrossed by tiny lines at the mouth and eyes, untidy, nondescript hair crammed underneath a floppy, unbecoming and stained hat, and a wiry, long body--that was Cassie Lennon at age thirty-five.
She had the face of a cat that had been left out in the rain, and who had gotten to like it. No warm bed for this cat, nor cat chow twice a day and a litter box. No having her fur brushed gently every morning and getting milk for breakfast. No lap sitting for this cat. Ellison Stewart went on and on, the cat metaphor dizzily racing around in his head as he stared blankly up at the woman he needed most in the world.
Mrs. Bishop and Leon began to materialize slowly alongside Mrs. Lennon in his eyesight. They too had the look of the cat. Mrs. Bishop’s beige and blue pantsuit…
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Cassie said. “Stop with the descriptions. If you don’t get up right now I’m going to call the ambulance. Then the police.”
Mrs. Bishop and Leon giggled.
Ellison propelled his upper body off the ground and propped himself with his arms. Cassie stepped back. His eyes were still blurry and his head full of damp wool. Leon’s giggling was getting to him the most.
“No cat chow,” the boy chortled. That started Mrs. Bishop back to laughing.
“Left out in the rain!” she whooped.
“Skin the color of dirt?” she commented.
“I was saying all that out loud?” he cried.
Three people snorted. Mrs. Lennon had the courtesy to look away before bursting into laughter. Mrs. Bishop and Leon almost fell over. Ellison’s face went red. Mrs. Lennon turned back to him.
“Wrinkles? You see wrinkles?”
Cassie removed her hat and all that marvelous hair finally escaped; brown and gold with a few gray strands, it was a cloud that hovered around her small, triangular, amused face for a few minutes before she grabbed the most of it and crammed it back under that hat. “Hell, I don’t care about wrinkles. I’ve got better things to do. And they are laugh lines, for your information.
“Now, just what are you three up to?”
Leon and Mrs. Bishop separated into two distinct people now that his vision was clearing. The third person was a striking woman in western work clothes and cowboy boots now glowering down at him with authority. She looked familiar somehow.
Ellison turned and gingerly pushed himself off the ground and stood up. He towered over everyone.
“Here,” Cassie said, the glower replaced with seeming embarrassment. “Put your shirt back on. You’re bleeding all over the place.”
She had to reach up to hand him the shirt. Cassie’s head came up to about his collarbone. “Did you break anything?”
Ellison automatically flexed his muscles, shook out his arms, and tensed his legs. As he opened his mouth to answer, she rudely interrupted him.
“My plants,” she said. “The wall. Did you tear anything up? Damn, I can see that you did,” she continued. “Just look at that!”