by Jack Ketchum
He smiled.
"There are no parameters," he said.
"You're saying we did that? Tapped into..."
"Something we don't understand. And why? Because the parameters don't belong to us. So much is scattered. So many cultures, so many different visions... There's so much to dissimulate, you know?" His bare shoulders shrugged. “What do you think?"
He lifted a finger, traced the claw marks on her breasts, then down her belly, then across her soft white thighs.
She shuddered, then laughed.
"I think it bears...further investigation," she said.
"So do I."
~ * ~
They arrived in a Rolls Royce White Shadow. Date of manufacture: 1916. Original owner: Nicholas Romanov.
The crowd at the door parted for them immediately.
The Rolls matched their own plumage. The white owl was Athena's bird.
Athena. Wisdom. War.
The feathers of her mask were real, luxuriantly arranged over a light wire frame with a soft satin lining, which was then affixed to the lined insert. The beak was a carven???(carved or craven?) horn.
Stephen's was a faceplate of pressed gold—the image, perhaps, of the sun god Apollo. Athena's brother.
They wore white satin floor-length cloaks and when they handed them to the woman at the club entry they were naked but for the masks, and wholly anonymous. She stood silent while patrons stared. To the pressure rings on her nipples he attached two long silver chains, trailing them down across her belly and reattaching them to two more rings on each of the lips of her labia.
They moved slowly side by side down the long dark hall and the crowd parted for them a second time.
Heavy chains and black leather manacles hung from walls and ceiling. A fat man tied by ropes to the steps of a wooden ladder was being whipped with a riding crop by his mistress. Few bothered watching.
Another man hung suspended from the roof of an iron cage. A crowd had gathered inside to watch two women insert needles through the flesh of his thighs and arms, swabbing at the specks of blood with balls of cotton. Further on, a rail-thin, multi-tattooed young woman was being racked by two hooded men in black leather pants and naked to the waist. They too had attracted their admirers. But Christine felt all those eyes shift to her as they passed in a tide of speculation.
Many had begun to follow.
He led her to a low dais inside another cage. She raised her arms to the manacles above her head and spread her legs wide to the shackles on the floor. The crowd gathered, grew, jockeyed for position. Captive bird. He gently removed the first chains and then the rings from her nipples and labia and then turned and spoke to the crowd.
Behind them, music blared. Slayer. Danzig. Killing Joke.
They heard him in spite of it. Not quite believing at first—not quite having heard or seen exactly this before. There were sidelong glances and nervous laughter. They hadn't seen this coming.
Nor, for that matter, had she.
"My sister," he said. "I give her to you. To touch, to know. To love as you see fit. One caveat. No pain."
Nods from the crowd, eagerly submitting.
The hunger in their eyes, and the smell of oil and leather.
He stepped aside. The sun god offering up his bounty.
She felt the touch of a dozen hands—male and female—all at once, stroking, squeezing her breasts and thighs, her ass, a finger probing delicately inside her ass, another in her sex, flicking, rolling the aching clitoris, moving slowly in and out, moving wetly across her belly, replaced inside by two more fingers, then three, then four, male and female both, stretching her wide into a pink fleur-de-lis, the tongue of a tall black woman moving deep inside her mouth, hands and heat and lips and teeth gently biting, gently pulling at her swollen nipples tender from the pressure rings and the long, deep scent of human breath and human flesh.
She felt serene. Soaring. Stroked by a dozen hot winds.
The white bird sailing through the night.
And came and came again.
In the dream she stared, amazed. Beyond the dusk she saw cities, or things like cities. Cities so old they were black. Odd architectures which extended along a vanishing line of horrid lightlessness. A raging terra incognito. Horizons crammed with stars sparkled close against cubist chasms. She saw buildings and roads, or things like roads, tunnels and pyramids and strange flattened edifices whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, endless as eons. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Ataxia the only order. Darkness the only light.
She lay paralyzed in the black, muttering dream. Small, soft nubs prodded her. Hands, or things like hands, reached out to touch her rice-paper flesh.
She saw it all. She saw time tick backward, death bloom into life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history.
~ * ~
In the night she awoke to the sound of him crying.
He no longer lay in bed with her. He sat naked in the dark at an Edgewood secretary, its mahogany writing lid opened.
A hand-dipped candle flickered.
"What? What's the matter?" she said.
Sleep had refreshed her. Even the dream, so oddly terrifying, seemed to rekindle her. His crying had thrust her into consciousness. Into strangeness. Not the dream.
"Stephen?"
"I'll lose you," he said.
"No you won't."
"Of course I will."
"Come to bed. You're not going to lose me."
A pause in the fluttering light. "You'll be the first then," he said. "Yes. I'll be the first. Now come to bed."
The Windsor chair creaked when he rose. The candlelight licked his skin. She stopped him as he crossed the room.
"And bring the masks," she said.
Then later, lamb and wolf.
He was the wolf.
Nanticoke, she guessed. Or Wicomico or Conoye. Tribes which had thrived along the Chesapeake from 10,000 B.C. until the 1600s, when England had christened the New World with metallurgy, gunpowder, and smallpox. These masks were possibly all that remained of them.
She was the lamb—in rut, squirming beneath the cunning predator. The masks clicked when their faces touched. They were wood, hand-carved a thousand years ago by shark-tooth awls gingerly tapped with hammers of flat slate. Both, again, had been laced to the linen-covered insert plates, the eyeholes of which matched exactly those of the masks.
The wolf's eyes hovered over her. They seemed strangely murky-blue, not like his eyes at all, nor a wolf's. For a moment they stopped her. She looked at the eyes behind the mask as if studying something acrostic. Sumerian cuneiform. Druidic glyphs. The Runes of the ancient Norse.
Mindless now. Something as dead as all those languages.
She sensed sapor and heat. She felt the flavor of his sweat and tasted the sound of his panting breath. She lay impaled, pinned to the bed, writhing beneath him, staring up into the otherness of his eyes. And then suddenly he reached up, tore the wolf-mask from his head and his mouth was at her breast—suckling her, suckling at the lamb and pulling hard and long, drawing the breastflesh deep and then deeper into his mouth and raking her nipple with his teeth, squeezing the breast with his hand, milking her, so that she felt something give and rise inside her, a small thick pulsing flow. Her eyes rolled upward, her teeth crimped her lower lip.
Then the lamb was felled.
Sated, the wolf rolled off her, slaked. The veneer of sweat cooled her skin as it dried. She continued to orgasm briefly, little pelvic stutterings, long after he'd withdrawn. Her breast ached. The tracery of scratches on her body felt luminous, sensorial glitter running along her nerves.
Jesus, she thought, her breath husky beneath the mask. She glanced over and saw a thick drool across his lips. Her own milk like semen on his face. Blood of the Lamb.
She fell asleep...
...and dreamed again. The strange, milky-blue eyes peered querulously at her. She lay naked, procumbe
nt now. The lamb before the slaughter?
No, this wasn't like that. Beyond the scape of sheer black, she heard muttering. It seemed echoic, sullen. Small, soft things entered her, not simply her orifices, but between her fingers, between her lacquered toes. Then, wet speckling. Cold. Hands, or things like hands, smoothed over her sleek back, down her thighs, the backs of her calves, the bottoms of her feet.
One climax after the next, subtle yet strangely powerful and so different. Her mind felt like a labyrinth now, an Eighth Century Chinese puzzle box only now beginning to open.
What had he said?
You'll be the first, then.
The climaxes seemed to be extracted from her, a long string of warm beads, little animals let loose...
And the black muttering drew on and on.
Later she wakened again, her face hot behind the mask. She didn't want to remove it though. She didn't know why. Stephen slept silently beside her. The candle had burned to a stub, its light diminished. She slid out of bed, padded barefoot past countless relics of countless times and out of the room.
Down the carpeted hall.
In the den stood a Federal-Period highboy, circa 1760. Over it hung a British "Brown Bess" musket and below that a blunderbuss whose hand-forged barrel must have been made a century before that.
She noted the Stradivari in its frame, complete with rosined bow. On the facing wall hung a crude iron mask of Xipe, the Aztec god of good fortune. And beside it, Quetzelcoatl.
Would these be the masks they wore next?
Or would there even be a next?
And why had she wondered that?
She parted the French doors, stepped out into the evening's sultry heat. A moon the color of jack cheese blundered above a reef of lit clouds. She stretched on the balcony, feeling her muscles loosen, offering her nakedness to the moon. The street below remained half-alive—only stragglers from parties and bars and whatever, the tired sad dregs of the city out at four in the morning—but up here?
No one could see her but the gods.
Her dark nipples stood erect. She rubbed her navel with her finger and flinched. An electric sensation. Then she touched herself lower and sighed.
In the pearlescent moonlight she let her hands open over the tight contours of her body. More electricity. Through the double-layered eyeholes of the mask, she gazed upward.
The moon shifted to a blur.
The sky turned black-pink.
A hundred dead cultures, she thought. A thousand. They've all looked at this same moon. A century ago or fifty centuries.
Her mind flowed; something gripped her. She knew she loved him. She had no idea exactly how or exactly why. Only that she loved him more than she'd ever loved anyone in her life. It wasn't just passion, it was all of it. His sheer unknowable depth, his grasp of life and the flow of time and cultures. Even his strangeness, crying in the dark. And she thought that perhaps the loves of her past weren't loves at all but just a long line of spoor leading to the point of time in which she now stood. Naked. Satiated. Giddy and exuberant.
Her vision shifted, gazing high into the dark. Not a dream this time, but a waking scape of abstraction. The black muttering kissed at her ears. She rose on her tiptoes when she sensed the tiny proddings. She felt so different now and she knew it was because of him, because of Stephen.
The man of her dreams? Nothing quite so trite. A man forged of the world, a man with sensations so far removed from the fodder of flesh that was her past.
A man to love, to be a part of.
She let the night's caress release her, then drifted back inside. The mask—thick carved wood plus the insert—should have felt heavy by now, but instead it felt like translucent skin. Her gaze roved the room.
From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah, she thought as her eyes strayed over his relics.
He's been everywhere. Everywhere on earth.
She stopped before a Shogun mirror with fabric inlays. Her image—her masked image—looked back.
She was beautiful, but...
The eyes.
Blue as the ocean, with a skein of milk.
Not her eyes at all.
Unsettled, she whisked the mask off. Tricks of candlelight and scintillant passions. Her senses, right now, couldn't be trusted.
The Asian carpet felt warm under her bare feet. She still felt too restless to return to bed. She wandered back to the highboy, opened the center drawer set with mother of pearl and flower petals of white pine.
A folder in there, atop a strange mound of clutter. She picked up a piece of the clutter and found it rigid, yet thin as newsprint. A curved I-beam the color of balsa wood that didn't even flex when she tried to bend it. What was this stuff?
And what was in the folder?
She set the wooden lamb's mask on top of the highboy's veneered mantle. Slid out the folder and opened it.
Yellowed sheets of paper, along with grainy black-and-white photographs.
Here was a picture of Stephen, in a military uniform, bending over a long piece of something in the desert. So he had been a soldier after all. The thing looked similar to the cryptic balsa beam she'd just handled. Another photo showed the I-beam up close, with markings, much like glyphs, embossed along its center.
She picked a sheet of paper out of the folder at random and read:
TOP SECRET, SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED. TEKNA, BYMAN 21 April 1972
Dear Mr. President:
Enclosed you will find our official analysis of the aforementioned incident concerning the vehicle tracked by NORAD on 18 April 1972. Crash perimeter verified, 198NE, 2017S, near the Nellis Military Reservation. All Army CIC and recovery personnel have been properly debriefed. Recovered material now in transit via INSCOM Technical Escort Unit, 61st Ordnance, to W-P AFB. Please advise in compliance with AFR 200-1.
Stephen D. Gannett, Major General 0-7 Commander, Air Force Aerial Intelligence Group Fort Belvoir, Virginia, MJ-12/Dept. 4
She stared at the sheet as though it were a skiving of human skin in her hands. Behind her the door clicked open.
"From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah," came his flowing voice. "From Galilee to Agincourt to the blood-fields of Carthage where Hannibal lost his dream."
The room seemed to hush beneath her stare.
He was wearing the mask again but she could still see his eyes, the eyes so blue, with veins of milk. He stepped forward once, twice. A third time. Measured, even steps. His hands opened out like a preceptor on an ancient mount standing before smoking crevices and plinths of obsidian and granite dolmens encrusted with the blood of the innocent.
"And from Kingman to San Angelo to Roswell," he said. And now his voice resembled a sound akin to crumbling rocks. "There is such truth in little things Christine, be they from here or from places we can't conceive. The little things, in a sense, are ghosts that haven't quite given up all their flesh."
His eyes moved toward the highboy and something in her nearly understood.
She snatched up her own mask from its top. Her fingers pressed against it. The wooden lamb mask stared up inert. But beneath it... The insert. The satin-covered lining.
She untied the insert from the mask's carved holes. The mask clunked to the floor—dead wood and nothing more.
The covered insert lay in her hands now like something stillborn. She untied its velvet strings, slipped the insert from its delicate lining. And withdrew...a second mask.
It shone silver, like metal, in the candlelight.
It had no weight at all.
"So much power in truth, and so much truth in culture, Christine." His milky-blue eyes stared hard at her through the face of the carven wolf. "All cultures, all relics. It's a symbology of life, isn't it? Mythology needn't belong exclusively to us. We'd be stupid to believe that."
Only then did she fix her own eyes on the insert, on the mask within the mask.
What looked up at her was this:
A curved plate in the shape of an inverted pear. The tiniest slit for a mou
th. Only a rudimentary bump for a nose.
And two spacious holes for eyes.
"In nearly all cultures, though," he said, "three is the charm." Her own eyes rose, then, back to him.
The wolf leapt.
And as the lamb was finally run to ground, the black muttering rose again from the deep, deep well of her soul.
Much louder this time.
It was nearly celebratory.
Eyes Left
Happy Hour at the World Cafe. 69th and Columbus.
At 4:30 after work, that was where we came. Neal from his studio and John from behind his camera over at ABC and yours truly from She Who Must Be Fed—otherwise known as Microsoft Word. Pretty much every day. There were other regulars who'd come and go but we three formed the core of it. We'd stand there talking at the bar, drinking and munching trail mix with Neal feeding the juke a couple dollars now and then to keep the blues and country flowing and so that John wouldn't start in with his goddamn Frank Sinatra.
You had to be careful with John and Sinatra. He'd play a whole CD and sooner or later he'd be singing along.
And we watched the ladies, of course.
Today was Neal's day On Point.
"Eyes left," he'd say.
That was what we did. Stake our claim on the liquor industry, tell jokes and bitch about life in general and listen to sweet blues and watch the women walk by along the hot summer sidewalk. We'd been doing it for years.
The only difference now was that some of the women were dead.
The women. They're the first best reason to love summer in New York City. The sidewalk outside the big plate glass window on Columbus brought along an endless procession of them—almost as though they were walking by just for us, just for the appreciation radiating out from inside. Sure, I know what you're thinking. A bunch of horny sexist pigs. Reducing women to the sum of their sexual parts. But it's not like that at all. At least not for me. For me there's a kind of reverence to it. All that beauty and diversity. All those blessings to our little lonesome planet walking around in shorts and tanks and halters. I'm serious.