Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (12 page)

There is a new round of discontented mutterings from the audience, for any given act of savagery can only slake its thirst for just so long, and now that period of time has expired. Well aware how quickly the worm may turn (though, it should be noted, there are no worms in this place we call a room), how readily painter can find herself a canvas, the white woman tightens her grip upon the razor and slides it between the thighs of the kneeling, bound, and only pale (but growing ever paler) woman. The razor does not yet touch her flesh, but lingers, millimeters from her sex, indecisive or merely teasing, merely drawing out the moment, stalling the unavoidable.

“Now, my sweet,” the white woman says, “a quick riddle to amuse our friends. Tell me, is my blade facing
up,
or is it, instead, facing
down
?”

The kneeling woman’s lips part slightly, and her eyes, which have become muddy and glazed with the burden of exhaustion and pain, abruptly grow both clearer and wider, swelling with new fear.

“
Tell
me. Tell me
quick.
They’re all waiting on your answer.” And when moments pass and still no answer is delivered, nothing but that uncertain, frightened stare, the white woman growls, “Tell me
now
!”

When the woman bound to the post speaks, she takes great care that the severed nipple does not slip from beneath her tongue. “Up,” she says, not
knowing
, but making her best educated guess based on the reputation of the white woman, this creature who was once Saucy Jack, and who, more than a century before the Whitechapel mystery, prowled murderous on all fours through the forests and vales of the Margeride Mountains of France, nameless, but earning for herself the epithet
La bête du Gévaudan
. And some one hundred and fifty years before the ravages at Gévaudan, she was known—in at least one worldline—as the Hungarian Countess Bathory Erzsebet, before finally growing tired of that game and the endless mutilation and slaughter of peasant girls and the daughters of the lower gentry who had been sent to learn courtly etiquette in her gynaeceum at Castle Csejte.

“Are you quite
sure
of that?” the white woman asks.

“Yes,” the kneeling woman replies. “Yes,
up
.”

And, at first, the white woman only smiles, but then the smile breaks apart into ugly gales of laughter, and she kisses her victim’s forehead and then her left cheek and, finally, her trembling lips.

“Yes!” the white woman proclaims. “You are such a perfectly
brilliant
fool, my doll. Up! Of
course
, it’s lip!” And with that, she slams the blade heavenward, slicing deep into the labial folds and vagina of the kneeling woman.

We do not need to note the screams, nor describe their specific attributes. Her screams are a given.

Shivering now, held upright only by the ropes about her wrists and sliding quickly into shock, she whispers “Six,” and the white woman nods approvingly, then yanks back on the mother of pearl-inlayed handle, pulling her razor free.

We need not note the screams.

“A wicked shame... it was not... down,” the white woman sighs breathlessly, grinning and intoxicated by the violence of her handiwork. The audience, once again won over and approving, offers up wolf whistles and shouts of “Brava!” and more applause. And the walls of this black space that we here call a
room
seem to shift and settle ever so slightly, so that dust sifts down from above, and the diaphanous curtains undulate in a sudden, fetid gust of displaced air.

The white woman stares at her razor for some length of time, feeling the wind from those inconstant walls and recalling a thousand other cuts, and then she pauses to lap at the kneeling woman’s tears, thereby making good on her promise. She brushes the kneeling woman’s sweaty, blood-slick hair back from her eyes.

“Do not worry,” the white woman says. “Maybe I’ll even stitch it closed for you later. Rut... first, we must finish the task at hand, what we have started, for it is the worst sort of sin to leave a story unfinished, or so I have come to believe.”

“Six,” the kneeling woman says again, her voice hardly more than a ragged sigh.

“Yes, dear, six—but
only
five, my sweet. Which leaves yet three remaining. You can
handle three,
can’t you?” And then, quickly, before there is time fora reply, the white woman’s blade—that sixth finger of her right hand, and also one of the many puppeteers who mind the strings of her will—hacks through the left ear of the kneeling woman.

We need not note the screams.

Someone in the audience calls out, “Come now! That one was old when van Gogh did it!” And the white woman snarls and tosses the flap of cartilage and skin in the general direction of the complaining voice.

“Seven,” she says, and never mind the possibility that they might think this somehow a show of weakness, not demanding the count from her supplicant. “And that leaves two.”

“Well, at least she can fucking count,” the carmine-skinned man mutters to the white woman’s
Mater Puerorum
, and, nearby, someone else chuckles softly to him- or her- or itself.

“You haven’t gone and swallowed that nipple, have you?” the white woman asks, and it seems to take the better part of an hour for the bound and kneeling woman to shake her head
no.

“Good, good. I think it might look pretty, pickled and floating in a jar of formalin. But, moving along to my second from last stroke...” and now the white woman seizes her victim’s right hand, taking care to select the middle finger from the rest, and she immediately begins to force it backwards. “You insulted me,” she says. “You challenged me. You dared to even
suggest
I was something less than what I am.”

The middle finger pops loudly, dislocating at the knuckle, but there is no scream this time. The kneeling woman merely shudders, her pain-wracked body convulsing once before it is still again. And, as though incensed by the empty place the scream should have filled, the white woman growls and bares her long canines.

“I have murdered
stars
in my time,” she growls. “I have scorched worlds, and you would dare to
doubt
me?”

When the dislocated finger has been forced so far that it rests flat against the back of the bound woman’s hand, the razor flicks again, slicing the finger free at the violated joint.

“We shall call that eight,” the white woman hisses, and “Eight,” her victim whispers, replying unexpectedly.

And now the white woman peering out through the windows of her tinted pince-nez—this one who is no longer Jack the Ripper nor
La bête
nor the Countess Bathory, and who is not, in this instant, driving a healthy yellow star to premature supernova—she permits herself the luxury of forgetting all those watching on. What happens next will be for her and her alone and the rest be damned (though, as it happens, simple, unobtainable damnation probably would come as a relief to the lot of them). She reaches down to the thatch of the bound woman’s pubic hair, and easily slips the detached finger into her—blood making such an excellent lubricant—then works it in and out, in and out, time after time after time.

“You
doubted
me,” she says again. “Now, as they say, you can fuck yourself, sweet.” She laughs, and though all the Others also laugh at her joke, at her wit and cleverness, she doesn’t hear them. She shoves the finger in a final time, pushing it all the way to the opening of the cervix and leaving it there.

“Don’t you let that slip out,” the white woman whispers and laughs again. Then she asks how many that makes, and how many she has remaining before she has taken her full measure of satisfaction. And because the lesson is Control, she waits in an affected mimicry of patience for the reply, and around her the curtains rustle intrigue and secrets and lies. And this indefinable space we have defined waits, also, as do the indefinable beings who have herein been designated Audience. All this time, all this pain and fury, all this void and unplumbed darkness, poised forever upon an invisible fulcrum. And then the answer comes, as it must, and the white woman lifts her razor again.

Flower and maiden were different and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)

1.

The young man’s work would be so much simpler if he were merely desirous his own death. A minute dose from any number of the glass vials or stoppered bottles in his possession, and the matter of his life would be quickly, and, if he so chose, painlessly concluded. Suicide, he knows well enough, is rarely farther away than the reach of his arm, or the distance from any given point to the spacious, but stuffy, room situated in one corner of the old greenhouse, the room that he’s converted into his apothecary, his laboratory, his grand mephitical cabinet. But his own death is
not
his goal, though accomplishment of that goal will likely, in time,
mean
his death. And the young man, whose name is Daniel, has long since made peace with this inevitability. If the end of his miserable life is the price of justice, than it is a price he is willing to pay.

And on any given night, during the course of the last year, he may be found sitting alone at the cluttered table cobbled together from salvaged scraps of plywood and nails. He sits on his stool and reads aloud from Cassarett and Doull’s
Toxicology: The Basic Science of Poisons
or the monthly journal of the Society of Toxicology from M. D. Ellis’
Dangerous Plants, Snakes, Arthropods, and Marine Life
or perhaps Haddad, Shannon, and Winchester’s
Clinical Management of Poisoning and Drug Overdose.
He sits here, and he reads, and he makes his meticulous notes and calculations, or he busies himself with the menagerie of banded kraits, Gaboon vipers, mambas, rattlesnakes, black-widow spiders, brightly colored dart frogs, Ethiopian deathstalker scorpions, caterpillars of the
Lonomia obliqua
moth, and Tasmanian inchman ants, those and two dozen other highly venomous terrestrial taxa. All must be properly fed and cared for, and, too, all must be milked. There are aquaria, as well, ten and twenty-five gallon tanks containing zebrafish, stonefish, weeverfish, blue-ringed octopi, various species of sea urchins, box jellies, and cone snails.

Beyond his laboratory, the old greenhouse itself is a cornucopia of virulent leaves and blossoms, roots and berries. There are pots and pallet boxes of nightshade, columbine, Jack-in-the-pulpit, buttercup, foxglove, monkshood, baneberry, blood root, bleeding heart, rock poppy, mandrake, and several varieties of
Rhododendron
and
Iris.
The young man named Daniel is especially proud of his success growing numerous forms of wild fungi, a collection which includes, but is by no means limited to,
Amanita
mushrooms, Ink Copernicus (only toxic when consumed in conjunction with alcoholic beverages), and the False Morel,
Gyromitra esculenta.
This is his bountiful
Jardin d’Éden
, his
edinu
, and every carefully chosen stalk is a cultivar of the original Tree of Conscience.

Only a handful of deadly animals and plants have eluded his acquisition, for one reason or another. The slow loris, for example, though its toxin is not particularly dangerous, he has savored the irony of employing in his endeavors a poisonous primate. He has also failed to acquire any other genus of venomous mammal, such as the insectivorous
Solenodon
of Cuba and Haiti, or a duck-billed platypus, or even one of the three relatively common sorts of poisonous shrews. Rut Daniel tries (though often in vain) not to let himself fret overly on these few missing bits of his garden, for he is keenly aware that the most lavish sort of overkill was surpassed quite some time ago.

It has, now, become more than anything else a question of distillation, combination, recombination, concentration, refinement, formulation, and so forth, and, too, the vexing and perilous problem of finding the absolute tolerance of his own regrettably fragile corpus. So, he labors here with pipettes and flasks, centrifuge and test tubes, hypodermic needles and stereomicroscopy. No mean task, no walk in the park, and already there have been a number of near-fatal mistakes. But from each one of these has he learned more of the necessity of patience. And, to be sure, the young man fears nothing now so much as futility and failure, that a single inattentive or reckless moment could ruin it all. And so he proceeds at the pace his work demands, always keeping desire at his back, that it might drive him forward, but never take the lead and spell disaster.

On this night, near the end of summer, he takes up a dried bit of fly agaric and works at it with mortar and pestle, and, now and again, he glances over his shoulder to seethe pallid shafts of moonlight falling across the long, straight rows of his garden.

2.

It begins
here,
let’s say, on some other night, nowhere near the end of summer, but in some interminable month of gales and ice and frostbitten windowpanes. It begins before the assemblage of Daniel’s garden, for few fairy tales are ever truthful in asserting that “Once upon a time...” is the genuine start of the story at hand. Little Red Riding Hood must have had a history of straying from the path and talking to wolves. We are never told through what alchemy or dark art the poor miller’s daughter came to be able to spin straw into gold. And what event, exactly, was the author of the Queen’s longing for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the embroidery frame?” There is always the beginning before the beginning, as all beginnings are, by degrees and necessarily, arbitrary. Prick any seemingly straightforward narrative, and it will, soon enough, hemorrhage infinite regression, the events contained therein falling back upon themselves like neatly arranged lines of wooden dominos. Not a hungry wolf, nor a spinning wheel, nor a distracted royal finger stabbed while embroidering, but a thousand prefacing occurrences, too inconvenient and indirect to be related in simple childhood fables. But, that said, we will begin
here,
on this cold and moonless night.