Kissing Carrion (21 page)

“No,” I said. “Tonight.”

My head still singing:
Give me your lips, the lips you only let me borrow . . .

My first punch caught him where jaw meets cheek, smashing his glasses like paper: The wire-rimmed frame slicing deep, embedding itself into the flesh and sticking there, a proverbial knife through butter. I picked him up bodily, threw him inside—he went down kicking, but couldn't find enough purchase to break himself free. One hand shoved down his pyjama pants, found the elastic, ripped, groped for my fly; I kept the other over his mouth while I kneed him in the chest, winding him before he had a chance to really scream.

. . . love me tonight, and let the devil take tomorrow . . .

And when I finally got his leg up high enough to cram myself inside, all he gave was a weird little shriek of outrage—before biting down on the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger, so hard and deep it seemed to explode with a gush of capillary-fed blood.

. . . I know that I must have your kiss although it dooms me, though it consumes me . . .

Jesus, it makes me sick just to remember. Sick at how good it felt. How good it still feels. My secret love for Beck made sudden, awful flesh, through dead Mrs. Silas' gift—a torch song dream whipped high and hot, let loose to burn down the whole waking world.

Love, this candy-coated, bright red lie that killed my life.

Love, my very own personal . . .

. . . kiss of fire.

* * *

In the alley now, watching the Temple's red windows flicker; breathing deep for the last of Beck's exhaust, the only thing of his I'll ever have again. Left two uniforms on stake-out in front, but I could get by them blind, never mind just drunk. I spent a year waiting for them to resurface, another casing this dump, before I finally gave up on the idea of revenge: Long as Mrs. Silas is still dead, I'm fucked no matter what happens to Herson and the rest. As well I know. Nothing they can threaten me with anymore, them or their Goddess.

But Beck's a whole ‘nother subject, even going by that bitch Aphrodite's rules—and that's where the Temple fell down, back when they taught Mrs. Silas how to work this spell of theirs on poor, dumb, shield-wearing assholes such as myself.

They took it all, everything—all except the one thing that makes me capable of doing what I'm gonna do.

A shed out back. Fuel cans, for the Temple generator. Easy to carry. Easy to set in clusters around the walls, run a trail from pile to pile. Easy to soak myself and walk on in, stinking—Herson's smelled me drunk before, though never on gas.

“Just wanted to tell you freaks you were right all along,” I'll say. “'Cause the fact is, I never loved anything till you put this thing on me. Not even myself.”

Singing along, silently, in the gathering red/black dark of my head:

Just like a torch, you set the soul within me burning . . . I must go on along this road of no returning . . .

After which, I think I'll give Herson a smile—give them all one, just like the day we picked up Mrs. Silas. Wide, and sweet, and waaay too happy to be anything but real bad news.

Saying: “But I do know what love is, real love. Now.”

And then, right then . . .

. . . though it burns me and it turns me into ashes . . .

. . . is when I'll light the match.

DAY ONE. STARTING
small. I went to your driveway, just before dawn, and picked out eighteen uneven white stones from the area falling under your car's shadow. One for every letter of your full name. Took them home, made the sign of the Cross reversed on their dusty skins in stolen gasoline—my own personal brand of unholy water. With eyes, lips, flesh between nail and finger, back of my throat all burning, breathing out fresh curse with each inverse word: Thee baptize I, Holy Ghost and Son, the Father, of Name the in.

The water was already boiling when I dropped them in. No salt necessary.

When it was all gone, I wrapped the stones in a clean dishcloth, put them back in my purse and walked six blocks down to the nearest sewage drain, which I was pretty sure would count as a river. Assuming the original recipe allowed at least some metaphoric leeway for we poor, unfortunate, city-dwelling practitioners of the Craft.

Then I went home again, and wrote this down.

* * *

Calling you. Calling you back. Leaving messages. Waiting for replies to said messages, replies that never come. Doing research, in between dialing; the same facts, mainly, barring some slight referential variations.

My books list at least thirty different methods of extracting payment from people who break their promises. At the rate I'm going, I probably could do two a day. Maybe more.

The next time you don't answer the phone, I'm going to make sure it's because you can't.

* * *

Day Two. Quartering lemons in the kitchen with my black-handled knife, each one coming apart with a sudden spurt, like acid-soaked yellow hearts. Skewering them with pins and leaving them to shrivel. I'm learning the lessons my mother never taught me, the secret lore of housewives—what a surprising amount of mischief you can actually do, without ever having to leave the kitchen.

Afterward, I scoured the cupboards beneath the sink for as many poisonous substances as I could find, took them out to the garage, tied a scarf around my face and mixed them up together in an empty bleach bottle. Added paste, two boxes' worth. Ripped up my largest pile of “disposable paper products.”

It took every letter I've written to you since the breakup, all those returned-to-sender vows of eternal devotion, to contrive a passable papier-mache likeness. Which I then left to dry, already rotting in on itself, until tomorrow's bonfire.

* * *

“Depression is anger turned inward.” That's what Dr. Abbott used to tell me. Or, as my mother once put it: “Depression is when you're already in mourning over a part of yourself you know you're going to have to kill.”

Some 1800s-era French murderess used to call keeping a diary “writing my novel.” It's a phrase I particularly like, because it implies being able to choose how your story will end.

This litany of curses. This literary stigmata.

I told you, more than once, how far I'd go for you, if you required it of me.

But I'll bet you never thought I would go this far.

* * *

Day Three. I took a photo of you and me, cut it in half. Stuck your half under the dripping kitchen faucet.

Dug up the old barbecue pit, set the head in the garage on fire, and watched it burn to goo.

As of tomorrow, I'm going to start getting a little more elaborate on your ass. Throwing out some old-style hurt your way, just like the good books say—and I quote:

 

Make an image in his name who you would hurt or kill, of new virgin wax; under the right armpit place a swallow's heart, and the liver under the left; hand about the neck a new needle threaded with new thread; place the hand where the foot is, and the foot where the hand is, and the head facing down; write the name of the party on its face, and on his or her ribs these words
: Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.

 

Then string it up by a thread and lightly stroke it, with a single damp finger. That slow, cool touch on your back, your side. That indefinite shiver.

Feel that sweat? Your face, moistening. In a day, it'll be wet.

In a month, it'll be gone.

* * *

You tell me you think you probably never loved me quite as much as I loved you. You tell me you did love me, but you don't any more. You tell me you don't want to hurt me. But how can I believe you?

Because if you could just wake up one day and know you didn't love me, then everything I thought was love was actually a lie. Which means everything else could be a lie, too. Everything you say now. Anything you ever said.

And how did you really think I'd feel, after you'd made your confession?

Because however little I was loved, it was always good enough for me. Back then.

Before I knew any better.

* * *

Day Four, Five, Six. Day Seven. Day Eight.

Day Nine, and counting.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, the difficulties, the sheer and simple
effort
of what I undertake for you. I mean, dough in a box on your window-sill, sure; boiling a lock of hair carefully collected from your barber's floor, no particular problem. (And did that keep you up at night? Yes? No?)

Oh, good.

But anyway: So you light a candle at midnight, and then break it with a hammer. So you light another, and bury it. Weave more hair into a bird's nest. Scrape a growing branch, and introduce the hair into it; watch, as the bark covers it over.

Try writing swear-words on consecrated wafers and feeding them to a toad, sometimes. Try burying that, alive.

I bury bottles and vials along paths we used to walk, knowing that where your foot touches them, disease will sprout. I bury an old glove I found in the back of the closet, stiff with the dust of your absence, and wait for it to rot. Drive rusty nails into your footprints. Shove hairballs from the neighbor's cat under your porch steps.

I contemplate breaking in one morning after you've run out of the house without flushing, late for an early class, and thrusting a red-hot soldering iron into your toilet.

In a magazine ad for condoms, I found a couple who look enough like you and her to qualify, and I cut them out, tore the picture down the middle. I gave her part to the only demon I could find—that perpetually drunk and crazy guy on the corner of Church and Wellesley. The other I keep safe, inside my pillow.

It gives me dreams, which I then send to you.

I sow dragon's teeth. I seed the clouds. I plow my broken heart in secret, in silence.

See what grows.

* * *

Here is how it works, then, for those who wonder:

Magic, white or black, operates on a principle of sympathy. You make an image, identify it with the person (usually by giving it that person's name), then destroy it. Fast or slow.

Patience and impatience, running in tandem. One action wears the wall between us away. The other cauterizes it. Dulls and dims your understanding of the wound's fatal nature, so it takes that much longer for you to die.

And the other part is, the person has to know. Which is why I'm writing you this at all.

At least, that's what I tell myself.

* * *

Day Ten. Of what month? My TV's broken, and all the paper boxes I saw today were empty.

I go to bed, early or late. I get up, early or late. I open my eyes in grey darkness, a pall so dim it almost qualifies as light. The clock is just another liar, and every hour is the same.

I'm so tired.

Guess I'll just have to take a key to my palm, jagged edge down, and cut myself a whole new lifeline.

* * *

By the way: I hope she breaks your heart. I hope you break hers. And then I hope the two of you sit around thinking about it, all the time. Crying for no known reason at your place of work. Ringing in items with everyone watching. Because don't fool yourself—you did it once, you can do it again, and somebody else can do it to you.

So don't you ever, don't you ever tell yourself again you're just the nicest little boy in the world.

That's two cherries you broke on me, you weak motherfucker.

* * *

Day Eleven.

My mother called this morning. I could feel it, somewhere in my stomach, the way cats always know when it's going to rain. But I couldn't call her back, because I've forgotten where I hid the phone.

Spent the day sticking flowers full of pins and lighting black candles, letting them melt down into malleable puddles of wax. I fumigated the house with all the evil odors of Mars, with sulphur and asafoetida. Staple-gunning yet more copies of that condom ad to my walls, torn so that your face no longer points toward her. Saying:

 

Usor, dilapidatore, tentatore, seignatore, devoratore, concitore et seductore—all ye ministers and companions, I direct, conjure, constrain and command ye to fulfil this behest willingly, namely straightaway to consecrate this image, which is to be done by
(insert name here)
in the name of
(insert name here),
and that as the face of the one is contrary to the other, so the same may never more look one upon another
.

 

But you don't care about all that. You don't care about anything I do.

Do you?

* * *

At 6:30 I reset my watch. I brought everything back down to zero.

I went through the house, breaking things. I was pretty systematic about it.

I went upstairs. I took off my clothes. I folded them neatly, and burned them.

I smeared myself with incense ash, and ran myself a bath.

I washed myself clean, nameless.

Soon I will take a new knife, never used before, and write your name on the inside of either wrist. An inch deep.

* * *

It's hard to write now, and I apologize for the way this letter must look. But you can console yourself with the knowledge that it will be my last.

The most effective spell of all in my catalogue involves baptizing something living in the name of the person you wish to affect, and then killing it. As the body decays, the person whose name it bears suffers a similar dissolution.

It's the oldest spell I know—the most direct. So, fittingly enough, I saved this one for last. Very pure. Very simple. If it works, I won't be around to take it off; if it doesn't work, I won't be around to find out.

Everybody wins.

* * *

I date this letter Day Twelve.

I think you will recognize the signature.

I wanted to dance with the young men in town

I wanted to dance till they hunted me down.

—Susan Musgrave.

IT WAS 1976, IT
was night, it was Malibu. Elder Tallbie bent over to snag herself a beer, posing for this big, dumb guy named Flynn who she had her eye on—normally straight as an equally big, equally dumb post—who thought she was a guy, and wanted her anyway. Desperately. Which was fine with her. Easier to move and act the way she wanted to, in this particular teeth ‘n' tits-obsessed decade, with a sexually ambiguous glamor to hide behind; she estimated it had probably been 75 years since she'd last worn a dress on more than two consecutive occasions.

Not that she missed the sensation, exactly.

As she rose, Elder caught Flynn sneaking a sidelong glance at her ass and gave him a narrow, wicked glare in return, licking the sharp tips of her fangs.

“Hey, fag,” she said. “You checkin' out my action?”

Flynn went red. “As if. Fag.”

“Fag.”

“Fag.”

And then it was later, time-lapse fast: The moon blinking up and over, a swollen white balloon against the endless night. They lay back in the light of the dying luau pit, surrounded by drained beers. Flynn trying hard not to let any part of him touch any part of her, as Elder toyed with her last bottle, and kept her fierce gaze firmly centered on his sweaty, fire-reddened cheek.

“Want to smoke a doob, man?” Flynn finally asked, falling back on his oldest—and most reliable, hitherto—trick.

“No, Flynn. I don't.”

“'Cause it's, uh, good stuff . . . ”

“No.”

Bicentennial firecrackers were going off somewhere in the distance, accompanied by the hoots and hollers of drunken children. Elder shut her eyes a moment, remembering grazing through a clutch of dying redcoats near the far side of some foot-bridge in upper New York State: Choking musketfire chest-wounds, faint Cockney and Lancashire curses. Blood leaking slow from the open side of one boy soldier's neck, even as she ripped the other wide and let the overflow spill down her greedy chops, soaking her bodice, drying so thick and hard that she'd actually had to throw her clothes away, afterward. She'd drunk her fill, drunk more, then eventually stumbled back to Eudo Lemonastere, three days late for their agreed-upon rendezvous—dazed, replete, naked and stained under a British officer's discarded frock-coat, with bugs in her unbound hair from sleeping under piles of leaves on the forest floor.

And Eudo had responded by slapping her face, sickened by her lack of restraint. Called her a peasant, uneducable, one brief step up from an animal.

She grinned at the memory, even now: Pretentious Eudo, her long-suffering maker and so-called master, with his clean white hands and his dirty, dirty mind. Still playing the saintly father-figure with her, vampire Pygmalion to her mortal Galatea, even after he'd paid her parents gold for the pleasure of taking her virginity—no different from any other aristocrat—and then hadn't been able to muster enough self-control to keep from killing her while he did it.

But guilt only went so far, after all. Which was why she most often chose her own spawn as she did, from the ranks of fools and freaks—to avoid, quite frankly, the inconvenience of ever having to feel any.

Flynn, Elder could tell, wouldn't be capable of considering his options long enough to resent losing his one chance at permanent oblivion. He'd welcome the Change with open fangs: One big par-tay 'till dawn and beyond. All of the fun, with none of the fallout.

She turned on her side, studying him closely. Watched him shift uncomfortably under her eyes' weight, readjusting himself, knee half-raised to mask his growing erection, with a cute little hip-twist for emphasis—a laughably furtive movement for someone his size, just this side of a squirm.

“'Kay,” he said, apparently still meditating on her bewildering refusal of free weed. “That's okay. Um. So. Well . . . ”

. . . what
do
you want to do?

Elder sat up, stretched, languorous. She leaned over Flynn, towards the cooler—”discovered” it empty. Leaned down, close, a little closer, then nose to nose; Flynn's sunburned surfer's beak looming dangerously close to her own sleek, cat-snub profile. Close enough for him to smell her, and rouse further—helplessly—at the pungent scent: Woodsmoke and spices, plus a faint slaughterhouse tang of old blood.

Appalling, the unexpected stink of it, under this fresh salt air. And yet . . . intoxicating, somehow.

“
Wellll
,” she repeated, drawling. “What I'd actually kinda like to do—is—to suck—”

(Flynn gasping, an incongruously tiny squeak)

“—your blood.”

“Whuh . . . ?”

Elder laid her lips on his, lightly, as her palm pressed against his straining crotch. Exhaled, equally light. And felt him shudder in response, groaning—spurting into his own baggy shorts at the barest touch of her clawed hand.

A slow whine: “Oooow, my Gohhhhdddd . . . ”

“You like that, big guy?”

Flynn shuddered again, eyes rolling; she nipped at his bottom lip, just nicking it—a paper-cut thin blood-weal, a mere shaving-accident scratch—and felt him spasm in response, paralyzed. Shaking like a dog left out in the rain, hair wild, sweat suddenly everywhere, gluing his hot skin to hers; her cool, nacreous moon-tan, pale as a pearl by the white beach's reflected light.

And then Elder slid down between his legs, taking his waistband with her. Pushing his poker-stiff penis aside to find the femoral artery, biting neatly in—hearing him yelp as he came again and again, gushing up over his own incipient pot belly. The beads of sperm choking his auburn pubic thatch until they hung in clusters, like limp stars.

Elder laughed aloud to herself at the sight, coughing blood through her nose. And went back to what she was doing.

Flynn, meanwhile, just kept on coming, right up until the very minute his big, dumb heart finally stopped: An empty thud, a last, wet squeeze.

Then silence.

* * *

Afterward, Elder buried them both in the sand under a pitched-over boat, curling catlike into the slack arm of his corpse. And when the next night fell, she slapped him awake—then hiked up her little boy's bowling shirt, and gave herself a shake in front of his dazed, red new eyes.

“Hey, man,” she said. “It's like, a miracle, or somethin'. Take a pull on you the once, and look what I grew.”

“Huh,” Flynn replied, surprisingly unsurprised.

Then, slow: “'M sorta . . . thirsty . . .”

Elder's smile widened. Sharpened.

“Yeah. I just bet you are.”

Thinking:
I give you about thirty years at the most, buddy. Starting now.

More like fifty, as it turned out. But by the time it finally came to pass, nevertheless, all she could find it in herself to feel was:
Hmm. Gee.

Right again.

* * *

“This cadre of yours,” Eudo began, disapproving, as the second millennium drew to its close outside—sitting pretty in the back of his limo, parked on the outskirts of Elder's first official all-vampire rave. “A haphazard collection of strays, detritus . . . ”

Outside, Flynn shot Elder the high-sign through the limo window, then put on a serious face, and asked one of Eudo's Familiars what looked like a fairly intimate question about his mother. The Familiar, doing a passable Eudo imitation, simply ignored him.

“Our Blood is not to be passed on lightly, Elder. There are channels, levels of approval.”

Elder nodded. “Same ones
you
were following, when you made me,” she suggested, idly playing with the hem of her shirt-cuff.

“I do find this continual harping on the circumstances of our first meeting remarkably tedious, Elder.”

“I know you do. Eudo.”

Beyond Flynn, Ulrike was augmenting her usual ballet-based dance moves with a series of Faster, Pussycat!-style go-go gestures. Tall, blue-eyed, blue-haired Ulrike, wearing nothing above the waist but a cross made from bondage tape over either tiny nipple. Ulrike, formerly single-name famous, who always struck Elder as having been genetically engineered to prove, through sheer embodiment, the general public's sneaking suspicion that no one who looked like—or was—a supermodel could really be quite human.

But here was Eudo again, still making that obnoxious,
I smell something
face of his: “I can't shield you forever, Elder. The Clave demands respect for tradition. You would do better—”

“I'll do what I want,
‘magistere' meo.
”

He sniffed. “As you say.”

“That's right.” Elder opened the limo door, stood up—snapped her fingers at the Familiar, who passed her her cane; Flynn came running at the sound, grinning. Throwing back, to Eudo, over a feel-it-in-your-chest-loud rush of sound: “
Exactly
as I fuckin' say.”

So don't let the coffin-lid hit you in the ass on your way out, motherfucker.

* * *

Later, she peeled Ulrike's crosses away—delicately, using only her blunt lower teeth—while Ulrike moaned in soft appreciation. Behind them, Flynn busied himself with the fourth occupant of their communal bed (some wannabe Familiar too pathetic to distinguish a valid invitation to the dance from yet another potentially fatal milking), baby-birding blood straight from the jugular back and forth to both women via long, exploratory, open-mouthed kisses. Ulrike, not normally interested in anyone born with more equipment than herself, tolerated this only because she wanted the hit; each successive draught made her shiver in Elder's arms, clutching, arching.

Elder, meanwhile, lay back on Flynn's heaving barrel chest, letting his sloppy worship drizzle crimson down the length of her naked torso. She felt him stiffen and hunch against her, heard his vestigial parody of breath grow ragged, while their shared victim's own breathing dimmed and clogged to a wet death-rattle. And wondered why this entire process—pleasant as it had once seemed, when she was still as young as Flynn or Ulrike—now made her feel far more bored than sated.

Thinking:
Things have to change.
And knowing full well that they would, eventually—no matter
what
she did.

Or . . . didn't do.

She turned her head in the hollow of Flynn's throat, and whispered—into his convulsing jawline—

“So: Big guy—”

“Uh.”

“That scientist you were telling me about? One who works for NASA?”

Murky, mouth full: “ . . . Uhuh . . . ”

“I want you to invite him by—tomorrow, next night , maybe. The uptown graze.” Snapping her claws against his cheek, sharply: “You hear me, Flynn?”

“ . . . sure.”

“Say it like you mean it, then. Just for my own personal peace of mind.”

Flynn wheezed, whimpered; Ulrike, hovering on the raw edge of climax herself, made time to force a last bark of laughter at his obvious distress. And then they were hugging each other, instinctively, bone-crack hard, crushing Elder fast between them—their mutual convulsions sending their victim's corpse sliding to the floor beside the bed, limp and pale, drained to nameless anonymity.

Already forgotten.

“I mean it, man,” Flynn whispered, finally, his sticky mouth glued to Elder's ear. And fell immediately asleep.

“Quel moron,” Ulrike muttered, face-down in Elder's lap. Then: “If you really want something
done
, you know, you can always send me.”

Elder just shrugged. And kept on stroking her “daughter's” spiky blue hair, until the blood-daze overcame Ulrike as well.

Thus freed from her spawn's distracting attentions, Elder lay looking up at the mirrored ceiling of her bedroom for the rest of the day, choosing to forgo her usual diurnal hibernation period in favour of thought rather than rest—something neither Flynn nor Ulrike would ever consider doing, even sheltered from the sun as they all were, here behind the penthouse's triple-layered steel shutters.

Bed-bound, Elder studied her own reflection at length, scanning in vain for any subtle hint of change. Everything was exactly as she remembered it, however: Her clean-lined jaw and flat cheekbones, the thick, roan fall of her hair. The thin scar bisecting one eyebrow, where the village priest's ring had cut it open with a backhanded slap after she'd blurted out that—with his dark locks and sorrowful eyes—the image of Christ crucified looked just like those Savages she'd seen trading furs down at the Post. The curve of her profile, incongruously elegant; a courtesan's nose, Eudo used to say, accidentally misplaced onto the face of a feral child.

Elder opened her narrow eyes wide, lips curling back, fangs extending: Her ancient's stare, androgynous and blank, an empty blue-green like teal touched with milk.

Well, she had to admit, Eudo did have one thing right—her story, sad as it might seem in retrospect (to her, at least), really was nothing new. Every night, the vampire nation increased exponentially just because some Old Guard-member found a piece of prey pretty enough to want to keep around forever. Yet these same parasite aristocrats remained, as a class, almost constitutionally incapable of realizing that no one could stay a toy for more than one lifetime.

Eudo, for example, had wanted first a quick meal, then a catspaw, a curiosity gained on his tour of the Americas—a real, unlive wild Colonial girl to dress up and show off, to play with and teach to sing, to dance, to read and write and make herself entertaining. And for fifty long years, at least, Elder had been utterly content to feed on his livestock and act the chosen whore for his delight: Ash-gal at the shindy, as her relatives' later Western descendants would have put it, by the colorful early 1850's.

To a point, though. Only to a point. And no—fucking—further.

Poor Eudo. It really couldn't have been
too
amusing, for a creature so ancient he craved amusement in almost the same immediate, desperate way he craved blood, to look into his pet's eyes—one night, in an endless string of nights—and suddenly see an equal staring back at him. Like a dancing dog, a preaching hen, a singing rose: Depressingly, confusingly, terrifyingly improbable.