by Gemma Files
Veruca surges against the crowd, chapbook already in hand, but Nim grabs her by the arm before she can quite start to move.
“You know there’s no way any of that actually happened, right?” she bellows over the roar.
“What part?”
“Like, any of it? Holy crap, Veruca, get a fucking grip. I mean, this is some sick sort of shit right here—”
Veruca purses her lips, a disappointed moue, like: Oh, Nim. And says, only:
“I have to go.”
“Veruca, look at them!” Nim has to scream now, feeling her face distort with the effort. “Does he look seventy? Does she look, what, a fucking hundred?”
“Not anymore.”
“They couldn’t get away with it. Not today. They couldn’t. Veruca!”
But she’s gone. Vanished into the crowd, a salmon slipping effortlessly beneath the rapids, heading upstream.
And it’s stupid, but Nim keeps on glitching on that…story. “The Emperor’s old Bones,” which she finally read in full on her way up here, under streetcar-light. That scene in the kitchen, that last phone conversation between “Tim” and the head chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine…
Sure, the author makes it sound “plausible” enough, in the moment—that’s his damn job. Even if you accept “The Emperor’s…” as Tim Darbersmere’s work to begin with, though, all the Wiki’ing in the world won’t let you skip over the fact that he did this exact same sort of shit before, a couple of times: the case-study for a disease that didn’t exist, that 1960s piece where he convinced everybody who was anybody he’d lost his arms to gangrene, after a car accident outside Cannes… And yes, glamour and exoticism turns tarnished if it’s revealed that the gruesomeness is factual, not just squeamish, gleeful metaphor—but it doesn’t matter, does it? After all—
—things like that aren’t true. Thankfully. Because if you thought, if you even suspected, even dreamed they were, then it’d be time to—
(bury yourself in the sand, face-down)
And besides which: How could it go unnoticed, even if? How could such a price be paid over and over again in a world of sins, DNA and GoogleEarth, of YouTube and datamining, a world drowning in celebrity poon-shots and political blowjobs, where nothing stays secret for long?
Yet: That’s exactly why, Nim suddenly realizes, silent and unmoving amid the rave, completely unconscious of the odd looks she’s getting from the crowd. Veruca thinks she’s stumbled across the greatest story never told, so she wants in. Not to take part, never that—but just to know, to be certain, to be on the inside, for once. If only the once.
So either Veruca’s just batshit and about to get thrown out for spouting craziness all over the host, or…
But Nim shies away from the or, on principle; she doesn’t believe it, doesn’t need to. Forcing herself into movement, shouldering her way through the crowd, sliding between bodies where she can’t force them apart, ignoring the passing gropes and the leered invitations; nothing matters now except heading Veruca off, before she can render both their chances at a genuine life even more remote.
Then—thud, stumble, recognition: anticlimax. Veruca stands (more accurately, sways) at the edge of a small circle ringing the good-looking man and his smoke-wreathed wife. Her face is pallid, her eyes wide and bright, and she clutches the chapbook to her heaving chest like a shield.
A second later, Tom Darbersmere can’t help but see her; his eyes widen, ever so slightly. Almost as though he—
(recognizes her)
He leans towards her, lips moving. Something that might be: My dear. And Veruca, Veruca…
Recoils, falls back. Goes whiter than white. Then backs away ‘til she hits somebody, blunders further, turns tail—
—and flees.
—
Nim follows after, into the maelstrom. Past couples dry-humping up against the door-frames, through room after room of excoriatingly loud music of every possible type, a thousand-song playlist set on infinite shuffle. In one of them, people toss wreaths of lit sparklers back and forth, like they’re putting on some carny magic show. In another, a man hangs from the ceiling by Sundance hooks, a softball stuck with nails held tight in either hand; his friends stand underneath, videotaping the ordeal, as blood drips onto their camera’s lens. Each successive room is hotter, louder, stranger—
Nim wipes sweat away and checks her watch, only to find she’s lost more than an hour. Thinks: ‘Cause time works differently, in here.
Then catches a flash of blonde up ahead, ducking through yet another doorway, and heaves forward again, trying to bridge the gap between them. Ending up somehow caught inside what seems like ten or so feet of bead curtains strung one behind the other, instead—she swims through them, their warm plastic leaving a sticky trail behind everywhere it touches, and spills through to the other side: a cool, dim room so insulated she actually can’t hear the music playing in the rest of the club anymore (though she can still feel the sheer erratic pulse of it coming up, floor acting as a remarkably efficient conductor, even through the three-inch soles of her shoes). The sudden contrast makes her heart slam up against her ribs, beating fast. She pauses, long enough to take it all in—
Dim and spare and hung with red, everywhere Nim looks. And it really must be later on, because the only people in there are Tom, Alicia (lighting a fresh cigarette with a flourish, then flipping her antique silver lighter shut) and a squat woman Nim doesn’t recognize at all: thick glasses behind which her eyes swim like tiny fishes; a corduroy jumpsuit with purple irises printed all over it; beige hair, beige skin, beige voice.
She carries something small and squishy-looking in a baby-harness slung tight over her massive bosom—not a miscarriage that’s been dug up and somehow laminated, as Nim horribly assumed at first sight, but a plush creature of some weird derivation, with a gaze as hooded and squinty as her own. It jiggles back and forth with her breath as she stares down at the table, a tealight candle slopping dangerously between her palms.
Tom, to Alicia: “Not this again.”
And: “I need to know,” Alicia replies, her voice nothing like Nim might have expected—flat, Midwestern, abnormally “normal.” “Especially now. Think you’d feel the same, tai pan.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah. You saying you don’t?”
A spark passes between them, chased with a sigh. “It is your club,” Tom points out, finally.
Alicia grins. “Well, okay, then.” To the woman: “Is it here, right now?”
The woman gives a long sigh, lips twitching feebly, as though she doesn’t want to answer. At the same time, beneath the frame of Nim’s gaze, something stirs; she strains to focus on it for a second, before realizing—
(Oh GOD)
—it’s that thing, that mockery, the woman’s snug-cocooned un-child, kicking out slightly in all directions, like it’s testing uterine waters. While the bulgy eyes blink and the mouth pulses in and out, stop-motion slow, like it’s clearing its throat…and from the woman’s own mouth, a slurred voice issues, hissing:
“…Alwaysss herrre.”
(Like it’s puppeting her. Not the other way ‘round.)
Oh man, I need to get out of here.
Nim backs up, praying Tom and Alicia won’t notice; thankfully, they don’t seem to. Not Alicia, anyhow—who leans forward, brows knit, and keeps on quizzing.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Nottt ttto youuu.”
“How do we get rid of it?”
“Youuu can’ttt.”
“Why not?”
A pause. “Becaussse…” the thing says, at last. “Itsss yoursss. Bothhh offf youuu. Yourrre…”
“…Part of it,” Tom fills in, softly.
Alicia snorts. “Like fun, tai pan.”
(That phrase: Chinese? Nim knows she’s heard it before, just can’t think when, or how—then feels the down on the back of her neck go up again, ruff-stiff, as she suddenly recalls exactly where.) More snore-y breathing. The �
�doll” speaks on, ignoring them both. Says:
“Ittt…hhhe. Knowsss youuu aaate himmm. Hisss liiife. Hisss…paiiin.”
“Well,” Tom says, softly, “he would, wouldn’t he? Can’t really miss it while it’s happening, not even if it’s done expertly.”
Alicia shoots him a look. “Enough of that crap,” she says, warningly, which gets her nothing but a single arched brow in return. As Tom points out—
“Really, ‘Lish: You’re the one who asked.”
And all through this, Nim is backing away, her face and body held equally rigid. She feels the plastic bead curtain hit her spine, stroke up her back, then collapse together in front of her; Tom, Alicia and the puppeted puppeteer blur and distort between the strands, as they fall into place. Step by step, Nim forces herself through, drowning in plastic. The music’s getting louder again, still reverberant with distance and distortion, and underneath it there’s a strange cross-current of sound; phantom cellos, sawing up from below.
Recognition’s a jolt of ice and adrenaline to the spine: That second layer, the Apocalyptica version of “Until It Sleeps” is her ringtone. Nimue fumbles in her purse and digs the phone out, the muffled tinniness of its repeated music refusing to fade, like it’s wrapped in invisible cotton. She puts it to her ear.
“Veruca?”
Static, broken by arrhythmic crackles that might be words. Nim feels her balance going out. She can’t tell if she’s pushing or falling. Her feet have gone numb. The plastic beads trail slowly alongside, kelp fronds in a nightmare sea that cling, and clutch, and—
Give way.
Nim stumbles back out into the Speed, the noise disorienting for half an instant. Then her mind seizes on Veruca’s voice—now obscured by nothing but the ordinary background roar—echoing in her ear. “Nim, where are you? Nim, please, talk to me—”
“On the floor!” Nim shouts. She casts about, futilely seeking blonde cornrows or lens-distorted green eyes. “Where the hell are you? What happened? Why—”
“I couldn’t do it. God, I was so wrong—sorry—” A hiss and a coughing huff follow, sounds Nim finds almost welcome in their previously-infuriating familiarity: Veruca’s taking a stress-triggered blast off her inhaler. “But I was right, too, you saw—had to see—tell me you saw—”
“V, where the fuck are you?” Nim yells back, jamming a finger past her naked tragus. “Your voice sounds weird.”
“It’s him, Nimue. Looks exactly the same, just…young.”
“Who looks the same?”
Another huff. Then, even fainter—like Veruca’s talking through a mouthful of cotton—
“…im…”
Nim scans around again, frantically. Eventually, something—some light-sliver glimpsed from the corner of one tearing eye—suggests where Veruca might have gone. “Dude,” she says, “listen to me, okay? Are you in the john?”
A fizzle-click “s”-slur is her only reply; might pass for “yes,” on a bad day. Nim takes it as her cue to head for the pertinent sign at speed, a flickering Georgia O’Keefe rubyfruit done in flickering neon. As Veruca keeps on chattering, between white noise waves:
“…said, it’s him. Them. They did it…like the story says, not made up, it’s all true. All of it. ”
“I’m comin’, man. I’m almost there.”
Puts her hand on the door, poised to push. And hears Veruca’s voice from inside, twinned: once via phone, once through the wood itself, but shit-scared either way. Suddenly dropping to a dull, tiny whisper, cold inside and out, as she breathes—
“—Nim, stop, keep out. Somebody’s here.”
The phone gives a half-silent pop! , drained battery abruptly dead.
Yet Nim hears another voice fading in, nevertheless—well, not hears it, exactly. More like remembering what it must have sounded like when somebody else heard it, a long, long time ago. A juvenile voice, pitched high, with that wandering edge that usually means drink, or drugs, or particularly high fever, saying…several things at once, it seems like, each sentence butting up against the one before, overlapping slightly. Like so:
I’m cold…Where you goin’, man? You said I could watch TV… Can’t move my legs…Why won’t you look at me? I’m right here, man…Just look at me. Please…
Nim can’t stop herself from applying her full weight against the handle, leaning steadily inwards. The door flaps out and back, spitting her into a washroom so ultra-cold and bright it’s practically Kubrickian—and as Nim looks up into the mirror, for one split second, she thinks she sees somebody standing behind her, a shadow quivering against the crack between jamb and post on the nearest stall’s door. So she turns, finds it gone; turns back, and finds the room is suddenly properly dim. All except—
—that other stall, the one within easy arm’s reach with its own door swinging half-open, a single black Nike trainer-encased foot…
(Veruca’s)
…wedged between hinge and jamb, not letting it rebound, let alone come to a full entropic stop.
And: God, Nim thinks again, though it’s not like she believes in one. Not officially.
Because Veruca’s inside, of course. Propped up on the toilet, pants securely fastened, that book wide open in her lap. But Nim can’t think of much to do about it except take “The Emperor’s…” from her, gingerly, holding it up by the corner like it’s sticky; let the spine flop open to expose its ill-glued core, its cracked and fraying threads. or press 911 on speed-dial, hoping she was wrong about her phone, while simultaneously averting her eyes—resolutely determined not to look down, not to try and read over her dead friend’s shoulder.
Kneeling there, touching the book with as little of one fingernail as she can manage, like she’s afraid it’ll rub off on her somehow, its rough cover slick and dirty as dead scale under her hand. And then there’s this sound from behind her, from the corner—somebody who doesn’t really need to breathe doing it anyway, deliberately clearing their no-throat, so she won’t crap herself with fear.
Child-light footsteps approaching, wetly, from behind her. A skinless little hand, slimy on her shoulder. An unwavering, pitiless light like a fifty-bulb night-shooting rack igniting with no perceptible warning, back-haloing the floor, the stall, Veruca’s sprawling corpse…
…while the voice, that voice, repeats every one of the phrases Nim heard through the bathroom door over again in an endless, profane loop: no ending and no beginning, just—pollution, ripples spreading outwards. Curdling everything in its path.
Just look at me, man. I’m right here. So…look.
(No. Not gonna.)
Can’t move. So cold.
(I’m sorry for that, kid. I really, really am.)
Yeah? Then turn around, right now. And look.
(You can’t make me.)
Oh no?
(Is that what you think, little geeky girl?)
You’d be amazed what I can do, I only take a mind to.
Heart bruising itself against her sternum from the inside, a muscle-and-valve jackhammer. As the voice keeps on, never raising, never falling. Never slowing. Never stopping.
He said…he was gonna take…care…of me…
Nim sits there on the bathroom floor with her eyes closed and two fingers jammed deep into the book, still automatically holding Veruca’s place for her, as hot red tears run down her face to drip on the bright white floor below. Sits there until it stops talking, until she’s almost certain it’s gone away for good. Then keeps on sitting there anyhow, hips and knees burning, cold creeping up through her pant-legs; her eyes still downcast, still shut lid-tight, afraid to open them again, in case.
Until, at last, somebody else comes in to pee. And the screaming finally starts.
—
Though the cops get there surprisingly fast, by the time they arrive, the Speed’s already cleaned itself up (and out) with alarming efficiency. No more blood-sports in the corners, no more pot-stink or bad behavior. Even the soundtrack manages to reel itself back a notch or ten, s
o nobody has to shout to make themselves heard while they give their deposition.
They let Nim go at 3:30 a.m., waving her briskly past the same ambulance they loaded Veruca’s bag-clad body into. And there, beyond the yellow tape, she finds Tom Darbersmere waiting for her.
“Your friend…” he begins. “…The girl with the glasses, same one who came up to me, ‘round midnight?”
“Her name’s Veruca,” Nim finds herself telling him, mouth suddenly too numb to quite form every syllable. A fact he doesn’t really seem to notice, observing only:
“Veruca: Was it really. How absolutely marvellous.”
A statement, not a question, odd to the point of insult. It stings enough to make her look up, into his eyes—
—where she does see sympathy, of a kind. But only like a shallow sheen: all surface, china-cerulean, pale and dry and faded. And not young, when you come to look at them this closely—in no fucking way young, not at all. Not even a little, tiny bit.
“My dear,” Tom Darbersmere says, pressing her hot hand between his two smooth, cool, dry ones, “I am so very sorry for your loss.”
Sorrowful and civil, utterly archaic. And so much like Veruca’s treasured imitation of his late uncle, it brings sick to Nim’s mouth. Something burning in her nose, behind her teeth, choking her. Something deep down in her gut and lower still, sinking to where it makes her groin ache and her muscles flex, burning, burning, burning to cut and run.
(“He’s exactly the damn same...”
Who, Veruca?
“...im...”)
Him: Tom. Or, rather—
—Tim.
(The not-so-Late.)
With Alicia—Ellis, Iseland—standing right behind him, at a middle distance, puffing away. Her smoke-coloured eyes boring into Nim, slow-motion bullets. As though she thinks if she just does it long enough, she’ll be able to read Nim’s address off her DNA.