by P. K. Tyler
Lana might have been broken but she was brave. She leapt out of bed, a tigress in a teen’s body. The silhouette turned and ran. It bumped its knee on her windowsill and cursed in a man’s voice. A moment’s pause, then Lana gave chase. Nimble and deft, the shape slipped out of her window. Lana slammed the window shut, adrenalin coursing through her veins. On the floor at her feet lay a small rectangle of card that Lana, perplexed, turned over and over in her fingers, thankfully free of tremors. What scared her more than the unfamiliar silhouette in her room, was that she felt changed, like an inexplicably human part of herself was missing.
* * *
Jermaine’s knee throbbed. He should have vaulted clear over the sill in the girl’s room, but a child had never woken before, and it had surprised him. For a brief moment, he had been sure she would give chase. Still, at least he had done his job, clumsy though it had been. The girl’s innocence surged through him, but Firenze would soon claim it. By his count, this would make the tenth, and Firenze had promised him an idyllic memory to replace his soiled ones. The burden of his past had become too heavy for Jermaine to shoulder any longer. He would accept any means to reconstruct it, even if it meant erasing himself. Especially, then.
He increased his pace, trampling leaves underfoot as he hurtled forward, head down, eyes hooded, more beast than man. The cemetery lay just beyond the rail track, its tombstones like teeth jutting out of a bloody mouth. He had chosen the crumbling crypt on the east side to be his home because humans didn’t come to graveyards gladly, and Jermaine preferred his own company. He had been burned too many times to trust others. He pushed back the winding vines at the entrance and rushed the door with his shoulder, wincing. It stuck otherwise. The air inside the crypt hummed with age. The little movement of air came from Jermaine’s coming and goings. No living thing ventured here apart from the toothy, scuttling rats.
“I have it,” he called out when the door had been sealed behind him. He hated the reverential tone to his voice, but it was not every day he crossed paths with the gods who walked amongst them. His parents would never have believed he had been chosen of all people. As he could not visit them without a surging anger that unraveled his sanity, perhaps they would never know.
The goddess crawled out of the ground, skin of soot, raven black hair cropped short, cloaked with the feathers of crows. Her feline eyes captured his. She straightened, taller than he, and the ground stitched itself back together behind her. She licked her fingers. “Underground’s no way to travel, especially after battered cod. Ruins the taste, ya know?”
Clipped steps came towards him, reverberating in the dank chamber. Jermaine hid his sweaty palms in his pockets, praying he seemed calmer than he felt.
“Which of us you praying to then?” she said. A smirk wrapped itself around her lips. Her eyes danced.
“Wasn’t praying.” The denial came quickly, as if belief were a flaw. Maybe it was. Stupid humans. It’s not like prayers had ever worked for him. He pushed away a fantasy of crushing his father’s skull. He couldn’t let Firenze see that.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s what you want?”
“No, no, just what we agreed.” Release. A few minutes’ release from his past. He needed this like an addict needs heroin.
“Very well. First things first. Don’t move.” She narrowed her eyes, and he flinched in anticipation of the prick of pain, the squeeze of his ribcage, as she claimed her prize. She patted her pocket in satisfaction. “Now it’s your turn. You might want to lie down for this. I’m very talented.” Firenze spread her arms in a flourish, sending his rat friends flurrying away in surprise.
Jermaine sank onto the stone floor, lying flat against the granite, his palms open. His eyelids flickered as he lowered them. He didn’t trust her enough to be at ease. He heard her voice, clear as the tinkling of glass. She invaded his inner eye and scattered his thoughts like orphaned planets in a lost world. Jermaine feared for his sanity then, that he would lose himself, but then he remembered this is what he wanted, to disappear and become somebody new.
A rush of air, and then pure joy as she injected a new memory into his brain. Gone, the damp bedroom at the bottom of the hall, the father with the belt, the mother with her empty breasts and sharp tongue. Instead, a woman takes Jermaine’s hand, soft skin caressing his. Clouds like candy floss, gentle to the touch. Straw teepees populate a beach, wet swimsuits hanging in the eaves of huts. He and the woman, surrounded by sun-worshippers, white, burnt, wobbly and smooth. He turns to watch a blonde woman with a boy cut and a deep V in her swimming suit. To his right, a bronzed god walks proudly past, forwards and backwards, basking in the attention. The woman hands him an ice cream. He can’t see her face but he is content. Grainy sand slides between his feet, sand as exfoliant, play sand, sand in his hair and his eyes. Sand coming home with him and sitting like silt on the surface of the bathtub. Warm, lapping sea, glittering in the sunshine like a newly washed shard of glass. Boys and girls bobbing in the waves with yachts in the distance and bright buoys in between.
Jermaine’s chest bursts with fullness and he doesn’t want to leave this moment, but, soon enough, he comes back to himself, and he is alone and cold on the stone floor.
* * *
The card was sharp. It split Lana’s fingers as she turned it over, crimson blood spouting until she sucked its salty offering. She read the black letters splayed out across its rectangular surface:
JERMAINE WYOMING
Highgate
Eastside Crypt
How strange for him to have left a calling card, as if he wanted her to follow, as if he was not an illicit intruder, but a professional of some sort. It would be idiotic to go after him, she knew this inside the rattling of her head, but the call of adventure was strong. It sounded like a golden gong in her head, illuminating the dreariness. Besides, how else would she find out what he had taken? She closed her eyes, and stillness pervaded. She pinpointed the place inside the walls of her flesh where she felt different. Yes, there. As if the fragmented memories of childhood frolicking before her diagnosis were slipping away. The memories that anchored her.
She had to find him; there was no time to lose. Lana pulled on a new pair of jeans and laced up her Converse trainers. She turned to look at her bed, and, on second thought, stuffed a pillow underneath her covers, in case her parents bothered to check on her. Then she tied her unruly hair into a swinging ponytail and zipped on a hoodie. She shoved Jermaine’s calling card and her house key into the pocket of her jeans. Seconds later, she found herself on the street, the moon in a cradle of clouds high above her.
From over the street came a “Shhh, shhhh, over here!”
Lana rolled her eyes, shook her head in a silent no, but still, the speaking statue beckoned, his hooded eyes brimming over with curiosity.
“No time to stop, Marlon. Maybe later.”
He shook his finger at her, the tip of it missing. “Not so fast, Missy. I’ve been standing here avoiding pigeon shit all day. The least you can do is humor an old friend.”
“Two minutes.” She tapped her foot with impatience. A spasm formed and she stopped the movement short.
His stone lips curved into a smile. “Why the rush?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see the creep climb into my bedroom,” said Lana, her eyebrows raised in incredulity.
“Oh him? The big bloke. He wasn’t a threat. And even if he was, what did you expect me to do? Holler so everyone heard?”
“Would have been a start,” said Lana. She shrugged. It was hard to stay mad at Marlon for long.
“Not like you to be out this late. Off anywhere special? You know how jealous I get, stuck here and all.”
“You’ve seen more than I have in a lifetime.”
“Aye, lass. Maybe I have.” He preened and in the globes of his eyes Lana thought she witnessed falling towers and shrinking seas. “Freedom is one thing. Still, ain’t a reason to be reckless.”
“Later, Marlon.”
/> “Tread carefully, Lana.”
* * *
A starless sky loomed as Lana approached Highgate cemetery. Row upon row of tombstones teetered in the soil, ominous and solemn. She wandered along well-trodden paths, taking care to avoid stepping where bodies might lie. Epitaphs glinted on dingy rocks in the moonlight and Lana paused to read the stories there. If there were gods, then this was their park, the evidence of lives lived and loves lost.
The meandering path took her to the east side of the cemetery, where a hexagonal crypt called to her, as if its image were known to her subconscious. No fear gripped her, although perhaps it should have; you could afford to be brave when your life was in retreat. She felt a thrill when the vines covering the crypt moved, and a wide-berthed man emerged, like the upside down hull of a ship.
“You,” said the man. He smelt of tobacco and dirt, the stubborn kind that gets stuck under fingernails.
Up close, even shrouded in darkness, he did not look forbidding. More, sad. Lana drew herself up to her full height but still came up lacking compared to the sheer mass of the man’s body. “Well, you left a business card.”
Jermaine colored. “Never know where you might pick up work these days.” He sniffed, and suddenly it seemed both ridiculous and marvelous to Lana, that she, feeble old her, could visit this graveyard in the middle of the night and speak to a strange man, and not feel fear. She giggled, delighted, and he looked at her like she had lost her marbles. A train of field mice filed past and Lana jumped, glancing at Jermaine for a reaction, but his face had become the blank wash of game hung on a wall.
“You’d better come in,” he said, stooping and disappearing into the nothingness beyond.
Goosebumps sprung up on Lana’s arms. She paused, considering her mundane life and all that lay before her: gradual deterioration of her muscles until her waking moments were spent in a wheelchair, never learning to drive because her body did not obey her, steroids causing her to grow bloated and irritable. She contemplated the road ahead paved with a lapsing memory and loss of bladder control as if she had lived a hundred years not seventeen, crushing depression she feared she was not strong enough to stave off, like a bank of clouds following just her. She projected herself into her future where real life twisted her ambition into shreds of nothing, with no hope of a cure, of not being able to form her words, articulate her disgust at the world, the unfairness and indignity of it all, her body a prison, her parents haunted. She decided in the blink of an eye, a nano fraction in which babies were born and men died, and the earth kept on turning, that she had nothing to lose. She scurried after Jermaine before the entrance to the crypt sealed.
Inside, the thin air made her dizzy. An army of beetles ran up a wall. Their bodies clicked in outrage. A march of degradation. Lana’s eyes grew small then large as they processed the light, gradually growing accustomed to their surroundings.
“Do you see her?” said Jermaine.
He was unsure. His unease put her at ease. “Who?”
His voice was a whisper like the turning of leaves outside. “Firenze.”
Lana’s eyes swung around the confines of the space like headlights on a barren moor. She made to shake her head. Perhaps this man had lost his sanity, just as she had lost her health, as simply and carelessly as a prized coin through the slot machines in an arcade. Forever gone. But then, the light twisted, or perhaps her mind, and a woman took shape, a woman born of the moon and midnight hour and the threads of dreams. She stood perhaps five-foot-tall, with red hair coaxed into a knot at the base of her neck, eyes like black diamonds with snake-like movements. The woman slithered towards her. Lana’s eyes widened.
“You do see her, don’t you?” said Jermaine, excitement launching his voice up from its natural register.
“Of course she does,” said the woman he called Firenze. “Her eyes are wide open.”
Lana reached for the key in her pocket, anything to tell her that she was awake and this wasn’t a dream. The cool metal sat in the palm of her trembling hand, but the drumbeat in her ribcage still raced. Her eyes blurred, then refocused, out of sync with one another. Blasted illness.
“Your mind is full of cobwebs for someone so young,” said the woman.
Lana jerked back towards the entrance of the crypt. Perhaps she had been hasty coming in here. She calculated her chances of escape. Her laces had unraveled and this small fact seemed to weigh entirely against her. She looked left, right, over her shoulder, a deer faced with its hunter.
“You don’t need to be afraid.” Firenze narrowed her eyes. “Ah, I see. You’re not well. That explains it.” She released a tinkling laugh. “You know, sometimes I’m more brilliant that I give myself credit for. This deserves a pint. First the work.” She shimmied, and the folds of her dress shuddered at her calves. “I can fix you Lana, but you will never be the same.”
Lana stepped forward. If this was a kidnapping, it was very strange. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Firenze smiled. “I’m whoever you want me to be. And I’m here to help, of course. I admit, sometimes I meddle, but how else can the wretched become whole? How else can I teach the ones who soar that they can come crashing to the earth like a comet? Tell me, Lana, what is your greatest fear?”
It seemed the easiest thing in the world to tell Firenze what she had been too afraid to tell her parents. “My body is dying and I’m scared I won’t be myself anymore.” She flushed. “At night I dream of being a tigress. In the morning, when I leave that form behind, I am bitter. It scares me that a fantasy comforts me.” The words tumbled out and, to Lana, it seemed she had picked a scab which had already begun to heal.
“You feel rage, yes?” said Firenze, releasing her red hair from its bonds.
“Yes.” The shadows darted this way and that, impossible without a light source.
“You know it’s a sign, don’t you?” said Firenze. “Pah. We give humans all the tools and still they stumble. Your rage is a sign that something needs to change.”
Lana shuffled on limbs that threatened to spasm. “You have any suggestions?’
“Sure,” said Firenze, drawing near, displaying cheekbones that appeared etched from the palest marble. “The real question is, do you have the courage? The realms of dream, death and depression have a lot to teach us. We cannot know who we are, unless we are stripped bare and helpless.”
A noise beside her signaled the tombstone man was up to something, but Lana could not tear herself away from Firenze. She listened, entranced.
“You see,” continued Firenze in full flow, “even in bringing you and him here together, I have given you life. You’re very lucky, really. You see confusion; I see opportunity. Grief and empathy transform us, even on the darkest night. Not one of us escapes unscathed, not even me. The real gift is the learning. And sometimes, sometimes, there is rebirth.” She paused, and her sly face shone. “Would you like to be reborn, Lana?”
“Yes.”
* * *
Jermaine turned, his hulking weight languid like a body under a stifling duvet. The girl had gone, or perhaps she had never been there at all. A flashback to other boys and girls, decades before, years that had passed by through the eye of a needle. Him in too tight dungarees and hair slicked down with his mother’s spittle, an overgrown boy scout, a magnet for schoolyard bullies.
“Jerry Wyoming, sounds like boning! Merry Jerry, groaning, foaming, boning,” they said, a chorus of singsong voices, ending in a cacophony of raucous laughter, him red-faced in the centre of it all. His mother stony-faced when he returned to the topsy-turvy house reeking of urine, unable to look her in the eye.
Jermaine shook his head to dislodge his rotten memories, trembling with his need for another hit of Firenze’s magic. He had already grown tired of this world. His eyes worked hard in the black, rearranging pixels, trying to build the shadows into solid forms.
“Quit your whining, Jermaine,” said a voice, and he knew he was not alone.
H
e really had to be more careful about shielding his thoughts from her. The child in him wanted to run to Firenze and bury his face in her bosom, but he knew instinctively she was not the motherly type.
“You two could be friends if you gave it a chance. Age in friendships is overrated. It’s experience, you know, that’s what really bonds.”
“Where is she?” he said.
“Preparing herself, of course.”
The girl’s face had morphed into dozens of others, and he could no longer remember her hair color or her race or the way she smelled. His breath quickened with fear as the present blurred leaving only the hated past intact.
“Oh, my poor boy. How wounded you are.” She stroked his face, the skin of her fingers like the bark of trees. The crypt had become airless. He needed to get outside. “I know what you want.”
He lowered himself to the ground, letting gravity bear down on him until it felt he might sink into the earth itself. The air filled his lungs, purer here than when he had been standing, his skull nearly at a level with the ceiling.
“I have your permission?” she said.
“Yes,” he breathed. He shut his eyes, and the tiny legs of insects crawled all over them and into the crevices of his sockets. The tombstones from the graveyard loomed large in his head until they travelled into the crypt with their sad lettering and remnants of degenerated, colorless blooms.
She lassoed the contents of his mind, easy as flicking a switch. An explosion of red and orange and yellow, a carnival of color. A thrill of childlike excitement takes root in his fragmented soul. He is more present, more alive than ever before. His small hand in a loving one. These nails are not his mother’s. Hers are flat, unadorned; these are red, vampish. He doesn’t care. Beside them, the squeals on the dodgems. He laughs with delight when she pushes candyfloss into his hand. He stuffs it in his mouth and the sugar bursts on his tongue, leaves a sticky trail around his mouth and between his fingers. They make for a Ferris wheel encased in blinding lights. She pulls him past goldfish swimming in a bag. The smell of cooking meat. He breathes in the grease. Slim, plastic bottles caked with ketchup and mayonnaise. He whips his head round to watch a girl in pigtails on her father’s shoulders. He needs more, but he is already spiraling away and his heart is a fistful of rags like the ripped shreds of a flag in the wind.