Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (6 page)

You nod, but your eyes are watching the window and the first faint rays of morning leaking in through the fabric. “So, I’ve found you at last, you old sinner,” you say, your voice gone as dry as an autumn wind and as cold as a mid-winter’s sun. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

Below the streets, and
then
below all that lies below the streets—basements and sewers, cellars and subway tunnels, lines for gas and water and electricity, cable television, the crawlways dug two hundred years ago by smugglers and pirates and those whose motives have been entirely forgotten. Below asphalt and grey concrete and moldering brick and sedimentary bedrock so honeycombed and hollowed that it’s surely a miracle the earth does not simply collapse beneath the combined weight of skyscrapers and automobiles and however many millions of human beings come and go overhead. Here, then, below all that lies below, is this ancient void carved not by the labor of picks, nor dynamite, nor machines, but by the hands (if we may call such appendages hands) of the ones who so long ago forsook the sun and moon that both are now little more than doubtful half-remembrances. The weathered limestone walls glow faintly with the chartreuse light of phosphorescent fungi, at least a dozen species of various grotesque shapes, found nowhere in the world but this cavern, aligned with the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, yet likely to remain forever unknown to prying, categorizing science.

And those who come here now, those few who find their way down, they come by choice, each and every one of them. None are ever
brought
here. None are lured, and none are shown the way. None are ever dragged kicking and screaming like the victims in some B-grade horror film. A month might pass between visitations, or a decade. The ones who keep this pit are patient and have long since learned to wait, relying upon providence and happenstance and whatever incomprehensible drive does, on occasion, lead one from above to seek them out.

She was half dead, by the time she found them, and now she is at best only half again that alive. Her name is Beryl, by chance—or not by chance—and for three years has she seen this deep place in dreams, for three years has she heard their voices and seen their faces. She hangs now suspended a few feet above the mire and stinking, motionless water that is their burrow. She did not resist when they came to her with the steel hooks and chains, because she’d seen all that in dreams, as well. As the antique hand winch—itself a marvel of rust and Colonial-era ironwork—was turned and the chains slowly grew taut, she did not cry out. When at last Beryl’s naked, shivering body was lifted from the squelching mud, she did not scream, though the pain was more than anything that she’d ever anticipated. The pain was never in her dreams of them, but she can now believe it nothing more than some splinter of the reward for her perseverance.
This
, she thinks,
is no more and no less than what was always meant to be.

They crouch directly beneath her, gazing up with famished, thankful eyes, eyes black as inkwells. There is already blood, drawn by the hooks piercing the skin of her calves and buttocks, back and shoulders, and it dribbles across their upturned faces like rain upon the parched faces of men and women who have survived a drought of ages. It is only the first, teasing drops before the storm, however, and they sit together in the mud with mouths open wide and their long tongues lolling to capture every drop spilled. Later, there can be waste, when the deluge begins in earnest. Later, the blood can pool, congealing in the ooze and spattered wantonly across the fungal walls.

Aside from the winch and chains and hooks, they have little in the way of tools. Their claws are sufficient to their modest needs. But there is one item, and if their memories were less undone by time and the slow madness that has come upon them across the centuries, they would recall how this one thing came to them, washed up on a rocky Massachusetts beach and discovered by a man whose name was once Zebidiah If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Wilmarth. All their names have long since been forgotten, for what need have they of names? The artefact found lying among sand and whelks, kelp and wave-polished bits of pink Cape Ann granite, is kept on a high ledge in the burrow, wrapped in a mildewed bit of burlap sackcloth. It bears some resemblance to a surgeon’s scalpel, but no more than it resembles a buttonhook or the high whorl of a snail’s shell. In 1789, Wilmarth showed the peculiar object to a scholar of archaeological studies at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, but the man was unable to determine it’s age or origin or even the material from which it had been crafted. For, at times, it seemed most certainly made from hammered bronze, while at others, and under certain wavelengths of light, it took on the characteristics of cobalt-stained glass of a sort known from excavations in Egypt and Eastern Asia dating back to the mid second millennium BC.

Suspended above them, Beryl hovers somewhere between the thresholds of ecstasy and shock, feeling almost as weightless as though her body were buoyed up by water. Her breath has become strenuous and uneven,and she is sweating now despite the chill air. Her long hair, an indifferent and unremarkable shade of blonde, dangles lank about her face and shoulders, and she keeps her eyes shut, because it seems impolite to watch them, when they have accorded her such an honour. Even when she finally feels their strange seeking hands upon her, even then, out of respect, she does not open her eyes.

They might yet reject me,
she thinks, though the thought is dimmed and made indistinct by the swelling, throbbing pain and by exhaustion and the bright sizzle of the adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her bloodstream and brain.
They may still see fit to pull me down and turn me out to either find my way back or die alone in the darkness.
She cannot know that this isn’t true, that though they are patient creatures accustomed to interminable waits, they have never once rejected a soul who has successfully navigated the labyrinth and so found the long, winding path down to them.

Wilmarth’s beach-found treasure has been taken from its place of pride, and the one among them who found it, but who is no
longer
Wilmarth, removes the oddly mercurial object from its filthy shroud and holds it up for all of them to see. The instrument glints dully in the feeble yellow-green light suffusing this cavity in the world’s bowels, and they all turn to see, momentarily distracted from Beryl and her gifts. This is as close as ever they come to awe or reverence, these rare glimpses of the thing that is neither a scalpel nor a buttonhook, that is neither bronze nor blue Egyptian glass. From their withered vocal cords come the most gentle utterances left to them, sounds which to Beryl’s ears seem hardly more than the final, strangling gasps of drowning men and women. But she knows, too, that it is not for her to judge the beauty or fearsomeness of these voices, and she is merely grateful to the dark gods of her secret pantheon that she has lived long enough to hear them at all.

The same one among these creatures who first touched the object holds it high above his head, left arm extended far as his atrophied reach will allow, and immediately all the others slither or hop or scuttle to one side or the other, clearing a path to Beryl’s suspended body. One by one by one, the crowd grows silent, ceasing their guttural exaltations, and she knows that at last her terrible journey is almost done. In her dreams, she has seen this moment half a hundred times, and Beryl does not need to open her eyes to know the gleeful, voracious expression on the slack-jawed face of the muttering thing advancing on her, or the way the instrument gripped fiercely in its hand has begun to writhe and twist from side to side, as though it has come alive and urgently seeks to escape its captor. She has only to wait, as they have waited for
her
, and she is confident the wait will not be a long one. The creature picks its way forward through the morass of mud and shit and piss-tainted water, moving with as much speed and agility as its twisted limbs are capable.

And then,
here,
the familiar is passed straightaway, and Beryl’s understanding of exactly what awaits her grows abruptly less definite, since it is from
this
instant on that her dreams have often varied and contradicted one another. For the first time, she fears something more than dismissal. For the first time since she has entered this chamber, she fears the unknown, however many or however few seconds still lie ahead of her and whatever they do or do not hold in store. From here, she can doubt herself, as she has not yet seen—even in dreams—what is to come, and so she cannot begin to guess whether she is equal to those ordeals.

The oyster-skinned creature who was once a man called Zebidiah If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Wilmarth squats below her, so near that she can feel his every hot, foul breath against her face. And suddenly faith is no longer sufficient, and the woman from Above opens her eyes and stares down into the face of the one who will be her executioner. There is an unexpected and indescribable softness in his black, eyes, a compassion she would never have anticipated, for what and who is she to find mercy among such as they? But there it is, unmistakable, regardless of her presumptions. A cast to that ruined and perfected face that she cannot mistake for deceit or only cruel misdirection. This empathy is genuine as her devotion to the pit dwellers, and finally she can allow herself to weep—not from the ravages of pain or dread or any shortcomings of her soul, but from relief and a duty to acknowledge the courtesy in her master’s face.

Perhaps it is no more than her exhausted imagination, but Beryl seems to “hear” a raw and grinding voice speaking directly within her mind.
Nothing which will be done here is done without your acquiescence
, it whispers.
No liberties will be taken. This is the Law, and the Law is eternal and inviolable.
And then the voice withdraws, and the creature’s face, by slow degrees, drains of its commiseration. Beryl nods, though she knows that the nod is irrelevant to what comes next, and the creature’s thin, pale lips stretch themselves wide in a ragged sort of grimace, exposing its crooked fangs and bucked incisors set firmly into rotten gums. But Beryl’s cloudy half-consciousness grasps the necessity of this exchange, that there may be no misunderstandings, and that her sacrifice will be untarnished by any equivocation.

The wasted thing squatting in the mud shows her the instrument, sent to them by the sea, lost therein for five hundred million years after it fell from the stars, adrift in the near-vacuum of inter stellar space a billion years before that, snagged by Earth’s insistent gravity, it fell, streaming incandescent gases. It has witnessed the demise of the trilobites and of the giant sea scorpions, has lain in benthic silt beneath the eel-like shadows of reptilian leviathans and watched on as the heretical grandfathers of the great whales abandoned land and returned to the oceans. Seeing it, Beryl knows that it has always hungered for her, just as it has hungered for all who have come before and who will come afterwards. It is beautiful and glorious and undeniable. It is a stray mote from the collective and insentient will of the Cosmos, the shard from an angel’s broken sword, a bit of refuse spewed across the event horizon of a white hole. It wriggles eagerly in the hand of the misshapen subterranean being who is not its keeper, but only its servant, and only that until its indisputable will chooses another.

Recollecting some diminished and useless appetite, the creature that was once Wilmarth raises the gnarled and taloned hook of its right hand and tries clumsily to caress Beryl’s exposed breasts, her belly and thighs, the matted thatch of her pubic hair, and she does not resist him. But the instrument clutched in his other hand shrieks its protest and begins to smolder. Beryl catches a whiff of seared flesh, and the creature stops fondling her.

“I am ready,” she says, speaking now for no one but herself, an affirmation to close a life that never could have led her anywhere
but
here, below the streets, and
then
below all that lies below the streets. And the oyster-skinned creature blinks his ebony eyes, and without further pomp or ceremony, he slits her open, sternum to crotch, and now comes the rich red flood and fleeting mitigation for their thirst, and all the greedy mouths rush in to drink their well-deserved fill.

From the rainy February street and the taxi, the collector of bones leads the boy through the lobby of the apartment building to the elevator, and hardly a word passes between them as cables and gears haul them all the way up to the fifteenth floor. The collector of bones is not a young woman, but she also is not a poor woman, and has long since discovered that she can have her pick of the hookers and hustlers who sell themselves on the streets of the city. Money talks, and meat listens and eagerly responds. This boy, twenty or twenty-one, but certainly no
older
than twenty-one, this one she picked up at Twelfth Street between Second and Third Avenues, and sure he’s a junky, but his addiction only makes the meat that much more eager. That much more vulnerable. The elevator smells like melting snow and stale cigarette smoke, like her perfume and the boy’s unwashed body, and each time they pass a floor, a hidden bell somewhere dings loudly, and every time it dings, the boy flinches. He must be so very new at this, the collector of bones thinks to herself, to be so jumpy, and that thought is the first thing all night that’s made her smile. The bell dings again, and the doors slide open, and she’s glad that there’s no one waiting to ride down to the lobby.

“This is our stop,” she says to the boy, and so he flinches again. “Everyone ashore who’s going ashore.” And she tells him to relax, that she’s not quite the Big Bad Wolf or the witch who tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. The boy smiles his nervous smile, and she almost asks him if its heroin or crack or something else. From the look of him, she thinks it’s probably heroin, but she’s always thought it impolite to pry.