Guises Page 9

  Not him; not that.

  The final thing she recalled was giving in at last to some show of repulsion, a slip in her goddess composure. She wondered if word of it would leak out and damage her flawlessly deviant reputation. That as this icy scurfy freak had ridden her, Nicole’s teeth had chattered.

  ««—»»

  Beauty which is perverse has a starkness as of raw corpses among dewy roses. Of dead children in the flayed arms of gods. Of white church steeples impaling the asses of virgin saints.

  She’d tried to send him a note, to telephone, to visit again. To inform him of her predicament. But there was never an answer, never anyone to even come to the door. She was a French heretic trueblood, one of the few left. She wouldn’t dilute it. She would never leave the last ripe quarter to join the three-quarters of the rest of Tyre’s End. Especially not for the baby of a family of mutants.

  Nicole recalled how she billowed into the clinic with the swell of her abdomen. The walls were the pale pink of albinos’ tongues and there were strange paintings of children everywhere, the kind with the absurdly large eyes. Some people thought these were adorable but they had always rather put Nicole off, wondering what would have to father such children to give them unblinking eyes.

  A bestial howl uncoiled through her belly skin, erupting nothing like a fart or peristalsis. All the other pregnant women in their frilly maternity tents stared up at her with fright, clenching gothic romances they were reading until the pages tore. Embarrassed, Nicole hung her head and walked past them to the desk.

  The receptionist looked up at her. “Have you an appointment?”

  Nicole thought of answering I am Venus and was invited… But this made no sense now, did it? It explained nothing.

  “Please, cut it out of me,” she whispered.

  The receptionist made solid eye contact with her for a space of time that seemed to hang limbless on a rack of minutes. What was the woman searching Nicole’s vision for? The limits of her desperation, proof of the corruptness she carried because shark fins swam circles in her black pupils? Whatever it was, the woman must have finally satisfied herself for she said, “Here are the consent forms we need you to fill out.”

  The lady handed Nicole a sheathe of black paper requiring red signatures.

  “Please come back here. I’ll show you where to undress,” said a nurse, smiling, not the least perturbed by a gibber that rumbled from Nicole’s navel. As if they heard it all the time.

  “It’s it,” Nicole murmured.

  “Hunger,” the nurse replied. But indicating whose hunger?

  She was then asked to lie on a stainless steel table. She was wheeled to the rear of the clinic. She was given a shot.

  She muttered under her breath to herself, “Not all that’s holy is celestial. Some women are destined to be the vessels of a violent infinitude.”

  Not that she intended to be. When she decided to have babies, she would be careful. Her own mother had born several, of which only Nicole lived. It was gossiped that they weren’t normal. But, then, most of the Tyre’s End trueblood women had freak offspring in the cemetery. At least, those belonging to Nicole’s mother’s generation—and prior to it did. Nowadays such drastic measures weren’t necessary, what with the clinic opening up.

  Nicole promised herself that she would be more cautious about her clients next time. She wouldn’t accept invitations, no matter how eldritch and bizarre the manner in which they were delivered, from those with the sort of enticing stories attached to them that Mr. Chaldes had. She was the one who was supposed to have a reputation preceding her. To give in to the titillation of possible delights on her own behalf was to place herself in needless peril. There were all kinds of dangerous men out there.

  A couple of nurses came into the operating theater.

  “Please cut it out of me,” Nicole repeated, feeling woozy from the light anesthesia.

  But the pair of masks shook their heads, back and forth like the long-short pendulum on the skewed clock. Scalpels flashed in their fingertips, gouging only bits from her exposed breasts where tiny mouths might need to fix.

  The gas they then gave Nicole smelled like fish and rotted meat. She thought it excessive they would give her both an injection and gas but maybe this was how it was done. She’d never had any surgical procedure before so what did she know?

  Her eyes fluttered. A giant beast swam up in a dream of very deep, very cold waters and unzipped his pants. (Did it seem reasonable a sea monster should have trousers? No…) The pipes of mad Pan sported chancres along a revealed tip where a twitching, discomposed oscillation throbbed and where music oozed all wrong. But it was delicious to the ears of crawling chaos.

  (It’s disorientation from the atropine or the ether or whatever they used on me. That’s all, she assured herself. It can’t really stink like that, and the walls aren’t really that scabby flaccid black.)

  The pair of nurses in curiously rustling smocks snapped on gloves. They spread their hands into the latex, and Nicole saw the thick webbing between the fingers. They each slid these into her cervix, one at a time, as if a single examination wasn’t enough.

  “It’s too early for contractions by a mile and a haunted light year,” said one of them.

  “But her convulsions break the monotony,” replied the other.

  They sighed and rubbed each other under the hems of their surgical gowns, only hitching them up sufficiently that Nicole could see that neither wore any underclothes. They faced her and did an obscene genuflexion with Nicole’s stolen secretions. It was then she noticed the tissue that stretched between them, linking them. It bobbled, writhing. Tiny openings on it gaped and closed, like breathing gills, like the lips on excited cunts.

  “What is this?” Nicole mumbled, her lips feeling numb, hips tingling. “Cut it out of me. I paid for an abortion.”

  They strapped her down.

  “The group is here,” the desk woman said as she entered.

  “Have they paid their admission?” asked one of the nurses. Which one, Nicole wasn’t quite sure.

  The woman held out two handfuls of a slyly colored gold. When she grinned Nicole again was convinced she was hallucinating. The receptionist had two tangled rows of teeth.

  “Let them in then,” the nurses said in unison.

  About a dozen severely malformed people shuffled through the door and lined up. They weren’t the sweet-faced denizens from a Todd Browning movie. They were not the results of unfortunate disease. Their clothes crawled across them as if things were moving under them, as if their skin had a mind of its own, as if it were reshaping itself for an adaptation which could never be. And puffs of silvery smoke gusted from the openings that every garment had until Nicole suspected they all carried dry ice in their pockets.

  Each queued before where Nicole’s legs had been spread, feet lashed into the stirrups. They leaned forward earnestly, leering into the revealed hole, shrieking in slack-jawed revelation disguised as fetid gales of laughter.

  “Stop! Who are you? What are you doing?” Nicole protested, trying to get out of the straps that bound her to the table.

  “We’ve come from the tent.”

  “From the carnival.”

  “From the mansion.”

  Did they mean they were from Cyanea’s circus? They were all very old, bones shifting under their coats creaking with arthritis. Nicole shook with revulsion, sure this was a trick of the anesthetic, because nothing so unspeakable could be real. It wasn’t smoke poofing from their collars and cuffs then. It was gray bits of themselves, going to dust even as they ogled her.

  A blindworm tongue was wet in her ear, bending close to whisper, “Goddess pussy, nothing is unspeakable. Just LISTEN!”

  Another slid up and murmured, “Your nightmare mating with the slime phallus, hips thrusting from an onyx realm…”

  All of them cried, “Oh, tell us!”

  “Did he ride you to and from the outlawed wastes, his palate drenched with the juices o
f the leech between your cheeks?” someone begged to know at the other ear.

  They chanted, “Share it with us, the faithful!”

  “Let me go!” Nicole whined, tongue half-lolling out her mouth.

  “Did he reveal the itch which burns beneath the snows of the mountains of madness…?”

  “Did he show you the mating habits of the legless shoggoths…?”

  “May we put our hands on her belly? So we may feel the shambling inside?”

  “That’s an extra charge,” one of the nurses informed them.

  “May we feed it? We were told at the mansion…”

  The two nurses nodded, eyes shining above their masks, the clit mouths on the appendage between them gaping and shutting.

  Nicole wept when she saw what they held in their hands: green hamburger, bits of cadavers so old the decomposition had gone to resin, white-rimed eyeballs plucked from fish heads, lice bred in Aztec tombs, terrified mice… They pushed their offerings past her swollen labia and wedged them up the slick vagina as if offering tidbits to exotic animals in a cage. Their granulating hands slid back out slowly, relishing the contact with her for as long as they could. One of them gasped and drew his hand out more quickly, proudly holding it up to show that he was now missing two fingers.

  Nicole thrashed, helpless, realizing that everything foul and worse was being accepted. A minion in the pesthouse of her uterus was absolutely turgid with a meat anticipation.

  “Hunger…” the nurse had said to her.

  Each of the visitors pressed their lips to her quivering well. They breathed invocations in a mutilated prose she half-recognized as Arabic from a Saudi client she’d entertained once. They slurred cheesy obscenities in a French even Baudelaire would have rejected. They guttered poetry of lotuses grown in drowned lagoons. They stammered bits of song it practically unhinged their jaws to pronounce.

  Then each one leaned very close, faces to her crotch to pull off a single genital hair from Nicole’s spread thighs, clenched between fetishist teeth. Each was ripe with a solitary dot of Fin du Tyre trueblood.

  “Relics of our madonna,” they whispered reverently.

  Nicole sobbed, hysteria bouncing her soul off the clinic ceiling. She saw a box of baby things the visitors had brought, in booties and bonnets made from a strange, unpuckered flesh, edged with chewed, placental lace.

  “Is that what you do with the fetuses here?” she shouted, seeing the ribbons on a tiny hat in miniature entrails looped in a grisly bow.

  “Oh, not to yours,” the conjoined nurses promised her, laying comforting webbed hands on her chest.

  Nicole cried for those poor children.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” one of the nurses explained, gesturing to the baby things. “Your offspring won’t be able to wear costumes like that.”

  “It won’t have the form for a doll’s things,” the second nurse agreed, clucking. Only in her mouth the clucking came out more as a slosh.

  “It’s going to sport a caul of dead suns. It’s going to be naked with eldritch memory,” said the first nurse.

  The second nurse added through her mask, “It’s going to wear the world.”

  In her mind Nicole saw a creature shaking a rattle filled with dead stars and howling the end of aeons.

  “For God’s sake, will you just cut it out of me?”

  Nicole cried, trying to regurgitate a rosary string she’d swallowed earlier, in an effort to exorcise the force within her. But the beads crackled in her throat like badly recited verse. She wondered if she would choke to death before she could be forced to give birth to this thing.

  She smelled the stench of saltwater rising up from her armpits. The mewling puffing from the birth canal was misty with purple rings of smoke. (Real smoke this time, not dust, not the crumblings to fleshy powder of geriatric monsters.)

  The surgeon entered, crabbing toward the end of the gurney where Nicole’s legs were spread. He pulled down his trousers to show nothing sterile from beyond the ebon gate. She knew who he was the second his scabby breath—creeping by osmosis through the stiff mask across the lower half of his head—struck her face and he whispered, “Misshapen me…”

  She recognized the flavor of frozen magma and pox on the gargoyle appendage he stuck in her mouth to silence her. It was nothing like the taste of even the most venereal crotch on any of the trueblood libertines she used to run with. The doomed silver of his gibbous eyes were those of a leviathan vagabond at the threshold.

  He jerked his foul member across her gums, and the nurses began to beat the floor with their fists. They gurgled out, “Cthulhu fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn…”

  Nicole’s involuntary sucking on this wound of primordial memory triggered. Fertile with a fable beyond immaculate, its lightning sliced out in both ascent and descent.

  The surgeon muttered behind his mask, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

  Nicole gagged as the breed of ancients—copper with gore and fattened on fatal visions—bubbled in her throat.

  “No more!” the surgeon uttered.

  Uterine waters roared in riptides as the first pinnacle of a rising kingdom split Nicole from groin to breastbone. The spray was not unlike a crimson surf. The building and then the street beyond were awash in the new flood.

  The nurses burbled through the gills behind their surgical masquerades of sargasso weeds, “Father, sleep no more!”

  From seas of her womb, Nicole’s dream-lock was picked.

  “Cut it out of me…” Her lips flapped back, mind ranting at how she could possibly speak in such a ruined condition, how she could even be alive with her groin and ribcage shattered outward and her face under all this water.

  “Yes,” someone answered. The surgeon or one of the nurses or another, even stranger voice rising from her pain.

  The Hydra with ready lullabies and the earth together rent with sonic screams. Her body disintegrated with the force, a continent sudden as a cardboard pop-up, spreading. And yet somehow Nicole was still aware—from somewhere—and watching as a god and his dreaming city unravelled from one dimension into this, serene on the waves.

  | — | — |

  LEGION

  Same nightmare building.

  Same plain counter arrayed like an icy bureaucrat’s altar: Come, lay your evils here, cross your wrists above your head to be bound with red tape, feel the incision from throat to crotch made with the computer’s /-slash key, and then the filling of your body cavity with reams of officious documents with runes to empty gods…

  Same mold-green walls.

  Same endless lines of tragic people, a legion exuding grief, leaking psychic floods of pain.

  Alameda had lost even the will to sigh as she stood at her window at the unemployment office. The muscles of her face had gone permanently slack years ago: she could neither smile nor frown. There was nothing left in the world that might surprise her. Her inability to feel seemed to translate to others that she couldn’t care less.

  They queued back until their trouble-bent spines bumped the farthest green wall. She looked up to see the seemingly endless stream of them, every Monday through Friday, eight to four-thirty, favoring one foot, or shuffling from right to left, fidgeting like children who would rather be in some friendlier part of the planet, or slung—motionless—in the stale air, waiting for the chance to reach the counter. To offer up their quota of despair to her.

  “Did you look for work last week?” she asked, by rote, words printed on the cardboard of her tongue.

  “Yeah,” the man replied, shoulders stooped, eyes not meeting her own.

  “Do you have affidavits signed by the employers you applied with, proving you filled out proper applications?” she asked. She was not to be fooled by shirkers who said they had sought work but who really just sat on their butts all day, watching soaps and Jenny Jones.

  He produced the required forms. A half dozen of them. She glanced at the signatures. They didn’t seem to be forged:
they weren’t in an identical hand. She stacked them in the box, later to be verified by phone.

  He smelled. Alameda wrinkled her nose. Well, they all stank, didn’t they? Of fear, just like anyone confronted by a wolf. Pheromones reeking in the sweat. A terror that they would never work again. That they would lose everything. Of worry, which was almost as sour as fear. Of the adrenalin—which came with the first reactions to their predicaments, an almost warrior-like response to the danger of imminent homelessness. Of the slow rot of paralysis which infused them later, making it so very difficult to go to yet another demeaning interview, to steel themselves for another rejection.

  It was as if many of them had simply given up washing anymore. Hygiene went out the window with self-respect.

  Alameda wondered if she’d remembered to shower that morning. She tried to recall climbing out of bed. She’d seen the other side was empty. Had Alex stayed out in the living room all night again?

  She’d headed for the bathroom, feet accidentally sliding into her worn slippers. She’d paused in the hall, seeing the light from the TV, not gray, not white, light green. Like a clearing in the forest where the sun settled at its brightest, muting the colors with an intensity in soft whisper. It was verdant with a murmur.

  That was where Alex sat in the recliner, eyes fixed on the screen, in the clothes he’d worn the day before.

  And she recalled arriving home last night, seeing him, not having the heart to ask Did you look for work…?

  The affidavits of months of “Mr. Alvarez applied for work with our company on March 15, 1997 but we regret we did not have a position open for him” were intaglioed into his features.

  Alameda had stared, trying to recognize him. Had he changed?

  His face was gone…the strength and self-confidence she’d loved. There was a shadow.

  And then she’d found herself at the unemployment office, punching in her card, entering her cubicle. Had she brushed her teeth? Stood under the water fresh and clean in a tumble over rocks in the forest, the silver music of it, the rush in beads surrounded by evergreens?