The Weird Part 106

Family.

Joyce Carol Oates.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) is an American author who has published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to portraying compelling, complex characters, Oates excels at writing stories with a New Gothic or weird sensibility, many of them terrifying or disturbing. 'Family' (1989) is a tale of weird science fiction horror and strange ritual that reads like the love-child of s.h.i.+rley Jackson and China Mieville.

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red ma.s.s, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. Above the patchwork of excavated land bordering our property all of which had formerly been our property in Grandfather's time: thousands of acres of wheat, corn, oats, and open grazing land a curious trembling rainbow sometimes defined itself, its colors s.h.i.+fting even as you stared, shades of blue, blue-green, blue-purple, orange, orange-red, orange-yellow, a translucent yellow that dissolved into mere moisture as the thermal breeze stirred, warm as an exhaled breath. And if you had run to tell others of the rainbow it was likely to be gone when they came. 'Liar,' my older brothers and sisters said, 'don't say such things if you don't mean them!' Father said, frowning, 'Don't say such things at all if you aren't certain they will be true for others, not simply for yourself.'

This begins in the time of family celebration after Father succeeded in selling all but a few of the acres of land surrounding our house, his inheritance from Grandfather, and he and Mother were giddy as children with relief at having escaped the luckless fate of certain of our neighbors in the Valley, rancher-rivals of Grandfather's and their descendants, who had sold off their property years ago, before the market had begun to realize its full potential. (Full potential were words that Father often uttered, rolling the words about in his mouth like round, smooth stones whose taste absorbed him.) Now they were landless, and their investments were shaky and they had made their homes in cities of increasing inhospitality, where no country people could endure to live for long. They had virtually prost.i.tuted themselves, Father said, sighing, and smiling and for so little! It was a saying of Grandfather's that a curse would befall anyone in the Valley who gloated over a neighbor's misfortune, but as Father said, it was d.a.m.ned difficult not to feel superior in this instance. And Mother vehemently agreed.

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of gla.s.s, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora c.o.c.ked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, 'planned' communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonis.h.i.+ng, towerlike buildings of aluminum and gla.s.s and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in suns.h.i.+ne like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow-moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.

So mesmerized was Father by the transformation of the Valley, perceived with dreamlike acuity through the twin lenses of his binoculars, the poor man often forgot where he was; failed to come down for dinner, or for bed; and if Mother, thinking to indulge him, or hurt by his indifference to her, did not send one of the servants to summon him, he was likely to spend the entire night on the roof...and in the morning, smiling sheepishly, he would explain that he'd fallen asleep, or, conversely, that he had been troubled by having seen things for which he could not account shadows the size of longhorns moving beyond our twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, and mysterious winking lights fifty miles away in the foothills. Mother dismissed the shadows as optical illusions caused by father's overwrought const.i.tution, or the ghosts of old, long-since-slaughtered livestock; the lights, she said, were surely from the private airport at Furnace Creek had Father forgotten already that he'd sold a large parcel of land for a small airport there? 'These lights more resemble fires,' Father said stubbornly. 'And they were in the foothills, not in the plain.'

There were times then of power failures, and financial losses, and Father was forced to give up nearly all of our servants, but he retained his rooftop vigil, white-clad, powerful lenses to his eyes, for he perceived himself as a witness and thought, should he live to a ripe old age, as Grandfather had (Grandfather was in his ninety-ninth year when he died, and then in a fall from a wasp-stung horse), he would be a chronicler of our time, like Thucydides of his, for 'Is there a world struggling to be born, or only struggle?'

Because of numerous dislocations in the Valley, of which we learned by degrees, the abandonment of houses, farms, livestock, even pets, it happened that packs of dogs began to roam about looking for food, particularly by night, poor starveling creatures that were becoming a nuisance in the region and should be, as authorities urged, shot down on sight these dogs being not feral by birth of course but formerly domesticated terriers, setters, c.o.c.ker spaniels, German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, even the larger and coa.r.s.er breed of poodle and it was the cause of some friction between Mother and Father that, despite his presence on the roof at all hours of the day and night, Father failed nonetheless to see a band of dogs dig beneath our fence and silently make their way to the dairy barn, where with terrifying efficiency they tore out the throats and surely this could not have been in silence! of our last six holsteins, and our last two she-goats, preparatory to devouring the poor creatures; nor did Father notice anything out of the ordinary on the night that two homeless derelicts, formerly farmhands of ours, impaled themselves on the fence (which was electrically charged, though in compliance with County Farm and Home Office regulations) and were found, dead, in the morning. (It was Kit, our sixteen-year-old, who found them, and the sight of the men, he said, tore his heart so skinny, gray, grizzled, he scarcely recognized them. And the crows had been at them early.) Following this episode Father journeyed to the state capital, with the purpose of taking out a loan, and reestablis.h.i.+ng, as he called it, old ties with his politician friends, and Mother joined him a few days later for a greatly needed change of scene, as she said 'Not that I don't love you all, and the farm, but I need to breathe other air for a while' leaving us under the care of Mrs. Hoyt our housekeeper and our eldest sister, Cory. The decision to leave us at this time was not a judicious one: Mother had forgotten that Mrs. Hoyt was in poor health, or perhaps she had decided not to care; and she seemed ignorant of the fact that Cory, for all the innocence of her marigold eyes and melodic voice, was desperately in love with one of the National Guardsmen who patrolled the Valley in jeeps, authorized to shoot wild dogs and, upon certain occasions, vandals, would-be arsonists, and squatters who were deemed a threat to the public well-being. And when Mother returned, unaccompanied by Father, after what seemed to us a very long absence (two weeks? two months?) it was with shocking news: She and Father had, after heart-searching deliberation, decided that, for the good of all concerned, they must separate they must officially dissolve the marriage bond. Mother's voice wavered as she spoke but fierce little pinpoints of light shone in her eyes. We children were so taken by surprise we could not speak at first. Separate! Dissolve! For the good of all! We stood staring and mute; not even Cory, Kit, and Dale, not even Lona, who was the most impulsive of us, found words with which to protest; the youngest children began whimpering helplessly, soon joined by the rest and by our few remaining servants; and Mrs. Hoyt, whose features were already bloated by illness. Mother said, 'Don't! Please! I can hardly bear the pain myself!' She then played a video of Father's farewell to the family, which drew fresh tears...for there, suddenly framed on our television screen, where we had never seen his image before, and could not in our wildest fancies have imagined it, was Father, somberly dressed, his hair in thin steely bands combed wetly across the dome of his skull, and his eyes puffy, an unnatural sheen to his face as if it had been scoured hard. He sat stiffly erect in a chair with a high ornately carved back; his fingers were gripping the arms so tightly the blood had drained from his knuckles; his words were slow, halting, and faint, like the progress of a gut-shot deer across a field, but unmistakably his: Dear children your mother and I after thirty years of marriage...very happy marriage have decided to...have decided to...have decided to... One of the low-flying helicopters belonging to the National Guardsmen soared past the house, making the television screen shudder, but the sound seemed to be garbled in any case, as if the tape had been clumsily cut and spliced; there were miniature lightning flashes; and Father's clear face turned liquid, melting horizontally, his eyes long and narrow as slugs and his mouth distended like a drowning man's; and all we could hear were sounds, not words, resembling Help me or I am innocent or I love you dear children and then the screen was dead.

That afternoon Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father's successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock, and regarded one another with wide staring eyes. Our new Father! Our new brothers and sister! As Mother explained patiently her new husband was no stepfather but a genuine father; which meant that we were to call him 'Father' at all times, and even, in our most private innermost thoughts, we were to think of him as 'Father': for otherwise he would be very hurt, and very displeased. And so too with Einar and Erastus, our new brothers (not stepbrothers), and Fifi, our new sister (not stepsister).

Our new Father stood before us beaming, a man of our former Father's approximate age but heavier and more robust than that Father, with an unusually large head, the cranium particularly developed, and small shrewd quick-darting eyes beneath brows of bone. He wore a fas.h.i.+onably tailored suit so dark as to resemble an undertaker's, and sported a red carnation in his lapel; his black shoes shone so splendidly they might have been phosph.o.r.escent. 'h.e.l.lo Father,' we murmured, hardly daring to raise our eyes to his. 'h.e.l.lo Father.' 'h.e.l.lo...' The man's jaws were elongated, the lower jaw a good inch longer than the upper, so that a wet malevolent ridge of teeth was revealed; and, as often happened in those days, a single thought shot like lightning among us children, from one to the other to the other to the other, each of us smiling guiltily as it struck us; Crocodile! Only little Jori burst into tears when the thought pa.s.sed into her head and after an embarra.s.sed moment our new Father stooped to pick her up in his arms and comfort her...and some of us could virtually see how the memory of our former Father pa.s.sed from her, as cruelly as if it had been hosed out of her skull. She was three years old then, and not accountable for her behavior.

New Father's children were tall, big-boned, solemn, with a greenish peevish cast to their skin, like many city children; the boys had inherited their father's large head and protruding crocodile jaws but the girl, Fifi, seventeen years old, was eye-catching in her beauty, with hair as mutinous as Cory's, and wide-set brown eyes in which something wolfish glimmered.

That evening certain of the boys Dale, Kit, and Hewett gathered close around Fifi, telling her wild tales of the Valley, how we had to protect ourselves with rifles and shotguns from trespa.s.sers, and how there was a resurgence of rats and other rodents on the farm, as a consequence of so much excavation in the countryside, and these tales, silly as they were, and exaggerated, made the girl shudder and giggle and lean toward the boys as if she were in need of their protection. And when Dale hurried off to get Fifi a goblet of ice water at her request she took the gla.s.s from his fingers and lifted it prissily to the light to examine its contents, asking, 'Is this water pure? Is it safe to drink?' It was true, our water was sometimes strangely effervescent, and tasted of rust; after a heavy rainfall there were likely to be tiny red wriggly things in it, like animated tails; so we had learned not to examine it too closely, and as our initial attacks of nausea, diarrhea, and faint-headedness had more or less subsided, we rarely thought of it any longer but tried to be grateful, as Mrs. Hoyt used to urge us, that we had any drinking water at all. So it was offensive to us to see Fifi make such a face, handing the goblet of water back to Dale, and asking him how anyone in his right mind could drink such spilth. Dale said angrily, 'How? This is how!' and drank the water down in a single thirsty gulp. And he and his new sister stood staring at each other, each of them trembling with pa.s.sion.

As Cory observed smiling, yet with a trace of resentment or envy, 'It looks as if "new sister" has made a conquest!'

'But what will she do,' I couldn't help asking, ' if she can't drink our water?'

'She'll drink it,' Cory said grimly. 'And she'll find it delicious, like the rest of us.' Which, of course, turned out very quickly to be true.

Cory's confinement came in a time of ever-increasing confusion...when there were frequent power failures in the Valley, and all foods except tinned goods were scarce, and the price of ammunition doubled, and quadrupled; and the sky by both day and night was criss-crossed by the contrails of unmarked bombers in a design both eerie and beautiful, like the web of a gigantic spider. By this time construction in most parts of the Valley had been halted, temporarily or indefinitely: Part-completed houses and high-rise office buildings punctuated the landscape; some were mere concrete foundations upon which girders had been erected, like exposed bone. The lovely 'Mirror Tower' as we children called it: It must have had a real name was a two-hundred-story patchwork of interlocking slots of reflecting gla.s.s with a pale turquoise tint, and where its elegant surface had once mirrored scenes of sparkling beauty there was now, from day to day, virtually nothing: a sky like soiled cotton batting, smoldering slag heaps, fantastic burdocks and thistles grown to the height of trees. Traffic had dwindled to a half-dozen diesel trucks per day hauling their ma.s.sive cargo (much of it diseased livestock bound for northern slaughterhouses) and a very few pa.s.senger cars. There were cloverleafs that coiled endlessly upon themselves and elevated highways that broke off in midair, thus as authorities warned travelers you were in danger, if you ventured into the countryside, of being attacked by roaming gangs but the rumor was that the most dangerous men were rogue Guardsmen who wore their uniforms inside out and preyed upon the very people they were paid to protect. None of the family left the compound without being well armed and of course the younger children no longer left at all. All schools, public and private, were temporarily shut down.

The most luxurious of the model communities, known to us as The Wheel its original name was forgotten: Whispering Glades? Deer Willow? had suffered so extreme a financial collapse that most of its services were said to be suspended, and many of its tenants had fled back to the cities from which they'd fled to the Valley. (The community was called The Wheel because its condominiums, office buildings, shops, schools, hospitals, and crematoria were arranged in spokes radiating outward from a single axis; and were protected at their twenty-mile circ.u.mference not by a visible wall, which the j.a.panese architect who had designed it had declared a vulgar and outmoded concept, but by a force field of electricity of lethal voltage.) Though the airport at Furnace Creek was officially closed, we often saw small aircraft taking off and landing there in the night, heard the insectlike whine of their engines and spied their winking red lights, and one night when the sun hung paralyzed at the horizon for several hours and visibility was poor though shot with a duplicitous sharpened clarity there was an airplane crash in a slag-heap area that had once been a grazing pasture for our cows, and some of the older boys insisted upon going out to investigate...returning with sober, stricken faces, and little to say of the sights they had seen except they wished they had not seen them. Miles away in the foothills were mysterious encampments, some of them mere camps, in which people lived and slept on the ground, others deliberately if crudely erected villages like those once displayed in museums as being the habitations of Native American peoples...the names of these 'peoples' long since forgotten. These were rumored to be unauthorized settlements of city dwellers who had fled their cities at the time of the general urban collapse, as well as former ranchers and their descendants, and various wanderers and evicted persons, criminals, the mentally ill, and victims of contagious diseases...all of these officially designated outlaw parties who were subject to harsh treatment by the Guardsmen, for the region was now under martial law, and only within compounds maintained by government-registered property owners and heads of families were civil rights, to a degree, still operative. Eagerly, we scanned the Valley for signs of life, pa.s.sing among us a pair of binoculars like forbidden treasure whose original owner we could not recall though Cory believed this person, an adult male, had lived with us before Father's time, and had been good to us. But not even Cory could remember his name. Cory's baby was born shortly after the funerals of two of the younger children, who had died of violent flulike illnesses, and of Uncle Darrah, who had died of shotgun wounds while driving his pick-up truck in the Valley; but this, we were a.s.sured by Mother and Father, was mere coincidence, and not to be taken as a sign. One by one we were led into the attic room set aside for Cory to stare in astonishment at the puppy-sized, red-faced, squalling, yet so wonderfully alive creature...with its large oval soft-looking head, its wizened angry features, its unblemished skin. Mother had found a cradle in the storage barn for the baby, a white wicker antique dating back to the previous century, perhaps a cradle she herself had used though she could not remember it, nor could any of us, her children, recall having slept in it; a piece of furniture too good for Cory's 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d child,' as Mother tearfully called it. (Though allowing that the infant's parentage was no fault of its own.) Fit punishment, Mother said, that Cory's b.r.e.a.s.t.s yielded milk so grudgingly, and what milk they did yield was frequently threaded with blood, fit punishment for her daughter's 's.l.u.ttish' behavior...but the family's luck held and one day the older boys returned from a hunting expedition with a dairy cow...a beautiful black-and-white marbled animal very like the kind, years ago, or was it only months ago, we ourselves had owned. The cow supplied us with sweet, fresh, reasonably pure milk, thus saving Cory's b.a.s.t.a.r.d infant's life, as Mother said 'for whatever that life is worth.'

Though she was occupied with household tasks, and often with emergency situations, Mother seemed obsessed with ferreting out the ident.i.ty of Cory's infant's father; Cory's secret lover, as Mother called him with a bitter twist of her lips. Yet it seemed to give her a prideful sort of pleasure that her eldest daughter had not only had a secret lover at one time in her life (the baby being irrefutable proof of this) but had one still despite the fact that no lover had stepped forward to claim the baby, or the baby's mother; and that Cory, once the prettiest of the girls, was now disfigured by skin rashes covering most of her body. And since her pregnancy her lower body remained bloated while her upper body had become emaciated. Mother herself was frequently ill, with flaming rashes, respiratory illnesses, intestinal upsets, bone aches, uncertain vision; like most of us she was plagued with ticks the smallest species of deer tick, which could burrow into the skin, particularly into the scalp, unnoticed, there to do its damage, and after weeks drop off, to be found on the floor, swollen with blood, black, s.h.i.+ny, about the size and apparent texture of a watermelon seed, deceptive to the eye. By degrees Mother had shrunk to a height of about four feet eight inches, very unlike the statuesque beauty of certain old photographs; with stark white matted hair, and pale silvery gray eyes as keen and suspicious as ever, and a voice so hard, harsh, bra.s.sy, and penetrating, a shout from her had the power to paralyze any of us where we stood...though we knew or believed ourselves safely hidden from her by a wall, or more than a single wall. Even the eldest of her sons, Kit, Hewett, Dale, tall ragged-bearded men who absented themselves from the compound for days at a stretch, were intimidated by Mother's authority, and, like poor Cory, shrank in guilty submission before her. Again and again Mother interrogated Cory, 'Who is your secret lover? Why are you so ashamed of him?' and Cory insisted she did not know who her lover was, or could not remember 'Even if I see his face sometimes, in my sleep, I can't remember his name. Or who he was. Or who he claimed to be.'

Yet Mother continued her investigation, risking Father's displeasure in so ruthlessly questioning all males with whom she came into contact, not excluding Cory's cousins and uncles and even Cory's own brothers! even those ravaged men and boys who made their homes, so to speak, in the drainage pipes beyond the compound, and whose services the family sometimes enlisted in times of emergency. But no one confessed; no one acknowledged Cory's baby as his. And one day when Cory lay ill upstairs in her attic room and I was entrusted with caring for the baby, feeding it from a bottle, in the kitchen, Mother came into the room with a look of such determination I felt terror for the baby, and hugged it to my bosom, and Mother said, 'Give me the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, girl,' and I said, 'No Mother, don't make me,' and Mother said, 'Are you disobeying me? Give me the b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' and I said, backing away, 'No Mother, Cory's baby belongs to Cory, and it isn't a b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' Mother advanced upon me, furious; her eyes whitely rimmed and her fingers well, what talons they had become! outstretched; her mouth twisting, working, distending itself and I saw that in the midst of her pa.s.sion she was forgetting what she meant to do, and that this might save Cory's baby. For often in those days when the family had little to eat except worm-riddled apples from the old orchard, and stunted blackened potatoes, and such wild game (or wildlife) as the boys could hunt down, we often forgot what we were doing in the very act of doing it; and in the midst of speaking we might forget the words we meant to speak, for instance water, rainbow, grief, love, filth, G.o.d, deer tick... and Father, who had become somber-minded with the onset of age, worried above all that as a family we might one day lose all sense of ourselves as a family should we forget, collectively, and in the same moment, the sacred word family.

And indeed Mother was forgetting. And indeed within the s.p.a.ce of less than thirty seconds she had forgotten. She stared at the living thing, the quivering palpitating creature in my arms, with its soft flat shallow face, its tiny recessed eyes, its mere holes for nostrils, above all its small pursed mouth set like a manta ray's in its shallow face, and could not, simply could not, recall the word baby; or infant; or Cory's b.a.s.t.a.r.d. And shortly afterward there was a commotion of some kind outside, apparently rather close to the compound gate, and a sound of gunfire, familiar enough yet always jarring when unexpected, and Mother hurried out to investigate. And Cory's baby continued to suck hungrily at the bottle's frayed rubber nipple and all was safe for the time being.

But Cory, poor Cory, died a few days later: Early one morning Lona discovered her in her attic bed, her eyes opened wide and her pale mouth contorted, the bedclothes soaked in blood...and when in horror Lona drew the sheet away she saw that Cory's b.r.e.a.s.t.s had been partly devoured, and her chest cavity exposed; she must have been attacked in the night by rats, and had been too weak or too terrified to call for help. Yet her baby was sleeping only a few feet away in its antique cradle, untouched, sunk to that most profound and enviable level of sleep at which organic matter seems about to pa.s.s over again into the inorganic. The household rats with their glittering amaranthine eyes and stiff hairless tails had spared it! had missed it entirely!

Lona s.n.a.t.c.hed up the baby and ran screaming downstairs for help; and so fierce was she in possession she could scarcely be forced to surrender the sleepy infant to the rest of us: Her fingers had to be pried open. In a dazed gloating voice she said, 'It is my baby. It is Lona's baby now.' Father sharply rebuked her: 'It is the family's baby now.'

And Fifi too had a baby; or, rather, writhed and screamed in agony for a day and a night, before giving birth to a piteous undersized creature that lived for only a few minutes. Poor sister! in the weeks that followed only our musical evenings, at which she excelled, gave her solace. If Dale tried to touch her, let alone comfort her, she shrank from him in repugnance. Nor would she allow Father or any male to come near. Sometimes she crawled into my bed and hugged me in her cold bone-thin arms. 'What I like best,' she whispered 'is the black waves that splash over us, at night.' And my heart was so swollen with emotion, I could not say no, or Oh yes.

For suddenly we had taken up music. In the evenings by kerosene lamp. In the worst, the most nightmarish of times. We played such musical instruments as fell into our hands discovered here and there in the house, or by way of strangers at our gate desperate to barter anything in their possession for food. Kit took up the violin doubtfully at first and then with growing joy, for, it seemed, he had musical talent! practicing for hours on the beautiful though badly scarified old violin that had once belonged to Grandfather (so we surmised: One of Grandfather's portraits showed him as a child of eleven or twelve posed with the identical violin, then luminously gleaming, tucked under his chin); Jori took up the piccolo, which she shared with Vega; Hewett took up the drums, Dale the cymbals, Einar the oboe, Fifi the piano...and the rest of us sang, sang our hearts out, our collective voices sometimes frail as straws through which a rough careless wind blew but at other times, and always unpredictably, so harmonious, so strong, so commanding, our hearts beat hard in unquestioning love of one another and of any fate that might befall us. We sang after Mother's death and we sang when a feculent wind blew from the Valley day after day bearing the odor of decomposing flesh and we sang, though our noses and throats filled with smoke, when fires raged in the dry woodland areas to the west, and then too a relentless wind blew upon us barricaded in our stone house atop a high hill, winds from several directions they seemed, intent upon seeking us out, carrying sparks to our sanctuary, destroying us in a paroxysm of fire as others, human and beast, were being destroyed shrieking in pain and terror...and how else for us to endure such odors, such sights, such sounds than to take up our instruments and play them, and sing, and sing and sing and sing until our throats were raw, how else.

Yet it became a time of joy and even feasting, since the cow was dying in any case and might as well be quickly slaughtered, when Father brought his new wife home to meet us: New Mother some of us called her, or Young Mother, and Old Mother that fierce stooped wild-eyed old woman was forgotten, the strangeness of her death lingering only in whispers for had she like Cory died of household rats? Had she like Erastus grown pimples, then boils, then tumors over her entire body, swelling bulbs of flesh that drained away life? had she drowned in the cistern, had she died of thirst and malnutrition locked away in a distant room of the house, had she died of infection, of heartbreak, of her own rage, of Father's steely fingers closing about her neck...or had she not died at all but simply pa.s.sed into oblivion, as the black waves splashed over her, and Young Mother stepped forward smiling to take her place...? Young Mother was stout and hearty-faced, plumply pretty about the eyes and cheeks, her color a rich earthen hue, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s capacious as large balloons filled to bursting with liquid, and she gave off a hot intoxicating smell of nutmeg, and small slippery flames darted when in a luxury of sighing, yawning, and stretching, she lifted with beringed hands the heavy ma.s.s of red-russet hair that hung between her shoulder blades, and fixed upon us her warm moist unblinking dark gaze. 'Mother!' we cried, even the eldest of us, 'Oh Mother!' begging would she hug us, would she fold us in those plump arms, press our faces against that bosom, each of us, all of us, weeping, in her arms, against her bosom, there. Cory's baby was not maturing as it was believed babies should, nor had it been named since we could not determine whether it was male or female, or both, or neither; and this household vexation Young Mother addressed herself to at once. No matter Lona's jealous love of the baby, Young Mother declared herself 'practical-minded': For why otherwise had Father brought her to this household but to reform it and give hope? She could not comprehend, she said, how and why an extra mouth, and in this case not only a useless but perhaps even a dangerous mouth, could be tolerated in a time of near famine, in violation of certain government edicts as she understood them. 'Drastic remedies in drastic times,' Young Mother said. Lona said, 'I will give it my food. I will protect it with my life.' And Young Mother simply repeated, smiling, her warm brown eyes easing like a caress over us all, 'Drastic remedies in drastic times.' There were those of us who loved Cory's baby and felt an unreasoned joy in its very existence, for it was flesh of our flesh, it was the future of the family; yet there were others, among them not only the males, who seemed fearful of it, keeping their distance when it was fed or bathed and averting their eyes when it crawled into a room to nudge its head or mouth against a foot, an ankle, a leg. Though it had not matured in the usual way, Cory's baby was considerably heavier than it had been at birth, and weighed now about forty pounds; but it was soft as a slug is soft, or an oyster; with an oyster's shape; seemingly boneless; the hue of bread dough, and hairless. As its small eyes lacked an iris, being entirely white, it was believed to be blind; its nose was but a rudimentary pair of nostrils, mere holes in the center of its face; its fishlike mouth was deceptive in that it seemed to possess its own intelligence, being ideally formed, not for human speech, but for seizing, sucking, and chewing. Though it had at best only a cartilaginous skeleton, it did boast two fully formed rows of tiny needle-sharp teeth, which it was not shy of using, particularly when ravenous for food; and it was often ravenous. At such times it groped its way around the house by instinct, sniffing and quivering, and if by chance it was drawn by the heat of your blood to your bed it would burrow against you beneath the covers, and nudge, and nuzzle, and begin like any nursing infant to suck, virtually any part of the body though preferring of course a female's b.r.e.a.s.t.s...and if not stopped in time it would bite, and chew, and eat...in all the brute innocence of appet.i.te. So some of us surmised, though Lona angrily denied it, that Cory had not died of rat bites after all but of having been attacked and partly devoured by her own baby. (In this, Lona was duplicitous: taking care never to undress in Mother's presence for fear that Mother's sharp eye would take in the numerous wounds on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, belly, and thighs.) As the family had a custom of debating issues, in order that all divergent opinions might be honored, for instance should we pay the exorbitant price a cow or a she-goat now commanded, or should the boys be empowered to acquire one of these beasts however they could, for instance should we make an attempt to feed starving men, women, and children who gathered outside our fence, even if it was with food unfit for the family's own consumption so naturally the issue of Cory's baby was taken up too, and threatened to split the family into two warring sides. For her part Mother argued persuasively that the baby was worthless, repulsive, and might one day be dangerous not guessing that it had already proved dangerous, indeed; and for her part Lona argued persuasively that the baby, 'Lona's baby,' as she persisted in calling it, was a living human being, a member of the family, one of us. Mother said hotly, 'It is not one of us, girl, if by us you mean a family that includes me,' and Lona said with equal heat, 'It is one of us because it predates any family that includes you.'

So each of us argued in turn, and emotions ran high, and it was a curious phenomenon that many of us changed our minds repeatedly, now swayed by Mother's reasoning, and now by Lona's; now by Father, who spoke on behalf of Mother, or by Hewett, who spoke on behalf of Lona; or by Father, whose milky eyes gave him an air of patrician distinction and fair-mindedness, who spoke on behalf of Lona! The issue raged, and subsided, and raged again, and Mother dared not put her power to the vote for fear that Lona would prevail against her. Father acknowledged that however we felt about the baby it was our flesh and blood presumably, and embodied for us the great insoluble mystery of life...'its soul bounded by its skull and its destiny no more problematic than the thin tubes that connect its mouth and its a.n.u.s. Who are we to judge!'

Yet Mother had her way, as slyboots Mother was always to have her way...one morning soliciting the help of several of us, who were sworn to secrecy, and delighted to be her handmaidens, in a simple scheme: Lona being asleep in Cory's old bed, Mother led the baby out of the house by holding a piece of bread soaked in chicken blood just in front of its nostrils, led it crawling with surprising swiftness across the hard-packed earth, to one of the barns, and, inside, led it to a dark corner where she lifted it, grunting, and lowered it carefully into an old rain barrel empty except for a wriggling ma.s.s of half-grown baby rats that squealed in great excitement at being disturbed, or at the smell of the blood-soaked bread which Mother dropped on them. We then nailed a cover in place; and, as Mother said, her color warmly flushed and her breath coming fast, 'There it is entirely out of our hands.'

And then one day it was spring. And Kit led a she-goat proudly into the kitchen, her bags primed with milk, swollen pink dugs leaking milk! How grateful we were, those of us who were with child, after the privations of so long a season, during which certain words had slipped from our memories, for instance she-goat, and milk, and as we realized, rainbow, for the rainbow too appeared, or reappeared, s.h.i.+mmering and translucent across the Valley. In the fire-ravaged plain was a sea of fresh green shoots and in the sky enormous dimpled clouds and that night we gathered around Fifi at the piano to play our instruments and sing. Father had pa.s.sed away but Mother had remarried: a husky horseman whose white teeth flashed in his beard, and whose rowdy pinches meant love and good cheer, not hurt. We were so happy we debated turning the calendar ahead to the New Year. We were so happy we debated abolis.h.i.+ng the calendar entirely and declaring it the year 1, and beginning Time anew.

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.

Poppy Z. Brite.

Poppy Z. Brite (1967) is an American author who initially achieved success during the 'new gothic' boom after publis.h.i.+ng several critically acclaimed novels. However, Brite's work always contained more influence from Decadent-era French and English writers than the contemporary horror scene. 'His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood' (1990) is a direct but original nod to those writers; Brite's strain of the weird is extravagantly and unrepentantly sensual. The writer is also influenced by the city of New Orleans, and has published a series of contemporary novels focused on the New Orleans restaurant world. Much of Brite's work features bis.e.xual and gay characters, and her fiction from the 1990s must be considered ground-breaking for this reason also.

'To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave,' said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.

'To the funeral lilies,' I replied, 'and to the calm pale bones.' I drank deeply from my own gla.s.s. The absinthe cauterized my throat with its flavor, part pepper, part licorice, part rot. It had been one of our greatest finds: more than fifty bottles of the now-outlawed liqueur, sealed up in a New Orleans family tomb. Transporting them was a nuisance, but once we had learned to enjoy the taste of wormwood, our continued drunkenness was ensured for a long, long time. We had taken the skull of the crypt's patriarch, too, and it now resided in a velvet-lined enclave in our museum.

Louis and I, you see, were dreamers of a dark and restless sort. We met in our second year of college and quickly found that we shared one vital trait: both of us were dissatisfied with everything. We drank straight whiskey and declared it too weak. We took strange drugs, but the visions they brought us were of emptiness, mindlessness, slow decay. The books we read were dull; the artists who sold their colorful drawings on the street were mere hacks in our eyes; the music we heard was never loud enough, never harsh enough to stir us. We were truly jaded, we told one another. For all the impression the world made upon us, our eyes might have been dead black holes in our heads.

For a time we thought our salvation lay in the sorcery wrought by music. We studied recordings of weird nameless dissonances, attended performances of obscure bands at ill-lit filthy clubs. But music did not save us. For a time we distracted ourselves with carnality. We explored the damp alien territory between the legs of any girl who would have us, sometimes separately, sometimes both of us in bed together with one girl or more. We bound their wrists and ankles with black lace, we lubricated and penetrated their every orifice, we shamed them with their own pleasures. I recall a mauve-haired beauty, Felicia, who was brought to wild sobbing o.r.g.a.s.m by the rough tongue of a stray dog we trapped. We watched her from across the room, drug-dazed and unstirred.

When we had exhausted the possibilities of women we sought those of our own s.e.x, craving the androgynous curve of a boy's cheekbone, the molten flood of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n invading our mouths. Eventually we turned to one another, seeking the thresholds of pain and ecstasy no one else had been able to help us attain. Louis asked me to grow my nails long and file them into needle-sharp points. When I raked them down his back, tiny beads of blood welled up in the angry tracks they left. He loved to lie still, pretending to submit to me, as I licked the salty blood away. Afterward he would push me down and attack me with his mouth, his tongue seeming to sear a trail of liquid fire into my skin.

But s.e.x did not save us either. We shut ourselves in our room and saw no one for days on end. At last we withdrew to the seclusion of Louis's ancestral home near Baton Rouge. Both his parents were dead a suicide pact, Louis hinted, or perhaps a suicide and a murder. Louis, the only child, retained the family home and fortune. Built on the edge of a vast swamp, the plantation house loomed sepulchrally out of the gloom that surrounded it always, even in the middle of a summer afternoon. Oaks of primordial hugeness grew in a canopy over the house, their branches like black arms fraught with Spanish moss. The moss was everywhere, reminding me of brittle gray hair, stirring wraithlike in the dank breeze from the swamp. I had the impression that, left too long unchecked, the moss might begin to grow from the ornate window-frames and fluted columns of the house itself.

The place was deserted save for us. The air was heady with the luminous scent of magnolias and the fetor of swamp gas. At night we sat on the veranda and sipped bottles of wine from the family cellar, gazing through an increasingly alcoholic mist at the will-o'-the-wisps that beckoned far off in the swamp. Obsessively we talked of new thrills and how we might get them. Louis's wit sparkled liveliest when he was bored, and on the night he first mentioned grave robbing, I laughed. I could not imagine that he was serious.

'What would we do with a bunch of dried-up old remains? Grind them to make a voodoo potion? I preferred your idea of increasing our tolerance to various poisons.'

Louis's sharp face snapped toward me. His eyes were painfully sensitive to light, so that even in this gloaming he wore tinted gla.s.ses and it was impossible to see his expression. He kept his fair hair clipped very short, so that it stood up in crazy tufts when he raked a nervous hand through it. 'No, Howard. Think of it: our own collection of death. A catalogue of pain, of human frailty all for us. Set against a backdrop of tranquil loveliness. Think what it would be to walk through such a place, meditating, reflecting upon your own ephemeral essence. Think of making love in a charnel-house! We have only to a.s.semble the parts they will create a whole into which we may fall.'

(Louis enjoyed speaking in cryptic puns; anagrams and palindromes, too, and any sort of puzzle appealed to him. I wonder whether that was not the root of his determination to look into the fathomless eye of death and master it. Perhaps he saw the mortality of the flesh as a gigantic jigsaw or crossword which, if he fitted all the parts into place, he might solve and thus defeat. Louis would have loved to live forever, though he would never have known what to do with all his time.) He soon produced his has.h.i.+sh pipe to sweeten the taste of the wine, and we spoke no more of grave robbing that night. But the thought preyed upon me in the languorous weeks to come. The smell of a freshly opened grave, I thought, must in its way be as intoxicating as the perfume of the swamp or a girl's most intimate sweat. Could we truly a.s.semble a collection of the grave's treasures that would be lovely to look upon, that would soothe our fevered souls?

The caresses of Louis's tongue grew languid. Sometimes, instead of nestling with me between the black satin sheets of our bed, he would sleep on a torn blanket in one of the underground rooms. These had originally been built for indeterminate but always intriguing purposes abolitionist meetings had taken place there, Louis told me, and a weekend of free love, and an earnest but wildly incompetent Black Ma.s.s replete with a vestal virgin and phallic candles.

These rooms were where our museum would be set up. At last I came to agree with Louis that only the plundering of graves might cure us of the most stifling ennui we had yet suffered. I could not bear to watch his tormented sleep, the pallor of his hollow cheeks, the delicate bruise-like darkening of the skin beneath his flickering eyes. Besides, the notion of grave robbing had begun to entice me. In ultimate corruption, might we not find the path to ultimate salvation?

Our first grisly prize was the head of Louis's mother, rotten as a pumpkin forgotten on the vine, half-shattered by two bullets from an antique Civil War revolver. We took it from the family crypt by the light of a full moon. The will-o'-the-wisps glowed weakly, like dying beacons on some unattainable sh.o.r.e, as we crept back to the manse. I dragged pick and shovel behind me; Louis carried the putrescent trophy tucked beneath his arm. After we had descended into the museum, I lit three candles scented with the russet spices of autumn (the season when Louis's parents had died) while Louis placed the head in the alcove we had prepared for it. I thought I detected a certain tenderness in his manner. 'May she give us the family blessing,' he murmured, absently wiping on the lapel of his jacket a few shreds of pulpy flesh that had adhered to his fingers.

We spent a happy time refurbis.h.i.+ng the museum, polis.h.i.+ng the inlaid precious metals of the wall fixtures, brus.h.i.+ng away the dust that frosted the velvet designs of the wallpaper, alternately burning incense and charring bits of cloth we had saturated with our blood, in order to give the rooms the odor we desired a charnel perfume strong enough to drive us to frenzy. We travelled far in our collections, but always we returned home with crates full of things no man had ever been meant to possess. We heard of a girl with violet eyes who had died in some distant town; not seven days later we had those eyes in an ornate cut-gla.s.s jar, pickled in formaldehyde. We sc.r.a.ped bone dust and nitre from the bottoms of ancient coffins; we stole the barely withered heads and hands of children fresh in their graves, with their soft little fingers and their lips like flower petals. We had baubles and precious heirlooms, vermiculated prayerbooks and shrouds encrusted with mold. I had not taken seriously Louis's talk of making love in a charnel-house but neither had I reckoned on the pleasure he could inflict with a femur dipped in rose-scented oil.

Upon the night I speak of the night we drank our toast to the grave and its riches we had just acquired our finest prize yet. Later in the evening we planned a celebratory debauch at a nightclub in the city. We had returned from our most recent travels not with the usual a.s.sortment of sacks and crates, but with only one small box carefully wrapped and tucked into Louis's breast pocket.

The box contained an object whose existence we had only speculated upon previously. From certain half-articulate mutterings of an old blind man plied with cheap liquor in a French Quarter bar, we traced rumors of a certain fetish or charm to a Negro graveyard in the southern bayou country. The fetish was said to be a thing of eerie beauty, capable of luring any lover to one's bed, hexing any enemy to a sick and painful death, and (this, I think, was what intrigued Louis the most) turning back tenfold on anyone who used it with less than the touch of a master.

A heavy mist hung low over the graveyard when we arrived there, lapping at our ankles, pooling around the markers of wood and stone, abruptly melting away in patches to reveal a gnarled root or a patch of blackened gra.s.s, then closing back in. By the light of a waning moon we made our way along a path overgrown with rioting weeds. The graves were decorated with elaborate mosaics of broken gla.s.s, coins, bottlecaps, oyster sh.e.l.ls lacquered silver and gold. Some mounds were outlined by empty bottles shoved neck-downward into the earth. I saw a lone plaster saint whose features had been worn away by years of wind and rain. I kicked half-buried rusty cans that had once held flowers; now they held only bare brittle stems and pestilent rainwater, or nothing at all. Only the scent of wild spider lilies pervaded the night.

The earth in one corner of the graveyard seemed blacker than the rest. The grave we sought was marked only by a crude cross of charred and twisted wood. We were skilled at the art of violating the dead; soon we had the coffin uncovered. The boards were warped by years of burial in wet, foul earth. Louis pried up the lid with his spade and, by the moon's meager and watery light, we gazed upon what lay within.

Of the inhabitant we knew almost nothing. Some said a hideously disfigured old conjure woman lay buried here. Some said she was a young girl with a face as lovely and cold as moonlight on water, and a soul crueler than Fate itself. Some claimed the body was not a woman's at all, but that of a white voodoo priest who had ruled the bayou. He had features of a cool, unearthly beauty, they said, and a stock of fetishes and potions which he would hand out with the kindest blessing...or the direst curse. This was the story Louis and I liked best; the sorcerer's capriciousness appealed to us, and the fact that he was beautiful.

No trace of beauty remained to the thing in the coffin at least not the sort of beauty that a healthy eye might cherish. Louis and I loved the translucent parchment skin stretched tight over long bones that seemed to have been carved from ivory. The delicate brittle hands folded across the sunken chest, the soft black caverns of the eyes, the colorless strands of hair that still clung to the fine white dome of the skull to us these things were the poetry of death.

Louis played his flashlight over the withered cords of the neck. There, on a silver chain gone black with age, was the object we had come seeking. No crude wax doll or bit of dried root was this. Louis and I gazed at each other, moved by the beauty of the thing; then, as if in a dream, he reached to grasp it. This was our rightful night's prize, our plunder from a sorcerer's grave.

'How does it look?' Louis asked as we were dressing.

I never had to think about my clothes. On an evening such as this, when we were dressing to go out, I would choose the same garments I might wear for a night's digging in the graveyard black, unornamented black, with only the whiteness of my face and hands showing against the backdrop of night. On a particularly festive occasion, such as this, I might smudge a bit of kohl round my eyes. The absence of color made me nearly invisible: if I walked with my shoulders hunched and my chin tucked down, no one except Louis would see me.

'Don't slouch so, Howard,' said Louis irritably as I ducked past the mirror. 'Turn around and look at me. Aren't I fine in my sorcerer's jewelry?'

Even when Louis wore black, he did it to be noticed. Tonight he was resplendent in narrow-legged trousers of purple paisley silk and a silvery jacket that seemed to turn all light iridescent. He had taken our prize out of its box and fastened it around his throat. As I came closer to look at it, I caught Louis's scent: rich and rather meaty, like blood kept too long in a stoppered bottle.

Against the sculpted hollow of Louis's throat, the thing on its chain seemed more strangely beautiful than ever. Have I neglected to describe the magical object, the voodoo fetish from the churned earth of the grave? I will never forget it. A polished sliver of bone (or a tooth, but what fang could have been so long, so sleekly honed, and still have somehow retained the look of a human tooth?) bound by a strip of copper. Set into the metal, a single ruby sparkled like a drop of gore against the verdigris. Etched in exquisite miniature upon the sliver of bone, and darkened by the rubbing in of some black-red substance, was an elaborate veve one of the symbols used by voodooists to invoke their pantheon of terrible G.o.ds. Whoever was buried in that lonely bayou grave, he had been no mere dabbler in swamp magic. Every cross and swirl of the veve was reproduced to perfection. I thought the thing still retained a trace of the grave's scent a dark odor like potatoes long spoiled. Each grave has its own peculiar scent, just as each living body does.

'Are you certain you should wear it?' I asked.

'It will go into the museum tomorrow,' he said, 'with a scarlet candle burning eternally before it. Tonight its powers are mine.'

The nightclub was in a part of the city that looked as if it had been gutted from the inside out by a righteous tongue of fire. The street was lit only by occasional scribbles of neon high overhead, advertis.e.m.e.nts for cheap hotels and all-night bars. Dark eyes stared at us from the crevices and pathways between buildings, disappearing only when Louis's hand crept toward the inner pocket of his jacket. He carried a small stiletto there, and knew how to use it for more than pleasure.

We slipped through a door at the end of an alley and descended the narrow staircase into the club. The lurid glow of a blue bulb flooded the stairs, making Louis's face look sunken and dead behind his tinted gla.s.ses. Feedback blasted us as we came in, and above it, a screaming battle of guitars. The inside of the club was a patchwork of flickering light and darkness. Graffiti covered the walls and the ceiling like a tangle of barbed wire come alive. I saw bands' insignia and jeering death's-heads, crucifixes bejewelled with broken gla.s.s and black obscenities writhing in the stroboscopic light.

Louis brought me a drink from the bar. I sipped it slowly, still drunk on absinthe. Since the music was too loud for conversation, I studied the club-goers around us. A quiet bunch, they were, staring fixedly at the stage as if they had been drugged (and no doubt many of them had I remembered visiting a club one night on a dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms, watching in fascination as the guitar strings seemed to drip soft viscera onto the stage). Younger than Louis and myself, most of them were, and queerly beautiful in their thrift shop rags, their leather and fishnet and cheap costume jewelry, their pale faces and painted hair. Perhaps we would take one of them home with us tonight. We had done so before. 'The delicious guttersnipes,' Louis called them. A particularly beautiful face, starkly boned and androgynous, flickered at the edge of my vision. When I looked, it was gone.

I went into the restroom. A pair of boys stood at a single urinal, talking animatedly. I stood at the sink rinsing my hands, watching the boys in the mirror and trying to overhear their conversation. A hairline fracture in the gla.s.s seemed to pull the taller boy's eyes askew. 'Casper and Alyssa found her tonight,' he said. 'In some old warehouse by the river. I heard her skin was gray, man. And sort of withered, like something had sucked out most of the meat.' 'Far out,' said the other boy. His black-rimmed lips barely moved.

'She was only fifteen, you know?' said the tall boy as he zipped his ragged trousers.

'She was a c.u.n.t anyway.'

They turned away from the urinal and started talking about the band Ritual Sacrifice, I gathered, whose name was scrawled on the walls of the club. As they went out, the boys glanced at the mirror and the tall one's eyes met mine for an instant. Nose like a haughty Indian chief's, eyelids smudged with black and silver. Louis would approve, I thought but the night was young, and there were many drinks left to be had.

When the band took a break we visited the bar again. Louis edged in beside a thin dark-haired boy who was barechested except for a piece of torn lace tied about his throat. When he turned, I knew his was the androgynous and striking face I had glimpsed before. His beauty was almost feral, but overlaid with a cool elegance like a veneer of sanity hiding madness. His ivory skin stretched over cheekbones like razors; his eyes were hectic pools of darkness.

'I like your amulet,' he said to Louis. 'It's very unusual.'

'I have another one like it at home,' Louis told him.

'Really? I'd like to see them both together.' The boy paused to let Louis order our vodka gimlets, then said, 'I thought there was only one.'

Louis's back straightened like a string of beads being pulled taut. Behind his gla.s.ses, I knew, his pupils would have shrunk to pinpoints: the light pained him more when he was nervous. But no tremor in his voice betrayed him when he said, 'What do you know about it?'

The boy shrugged. On his bony shoulders, the movement was insouciant and drop-dead graceful. 'It's voodoo,' he said. 'I know what voodoo is. Do you?'

The implication stung, but Louis only bared his teeth the slightest bit; it might have been a smile. 'I am conversant in all types of magic,' he said, 'at least.'

The boy moved closer to Louis, so that their hips were almost touching, and lifted the amulet between thumb and forefinger. I thought I saw one long nail brush Louis's throat, but I could not be sure. 'I could tell you the meaning of this veve,' he said, 'if you were certain you wished to know.'

'It symbolizes power,' Louis said. 'All the power of my soul.' His voice was cold, but I saw his tongue dart out to moisten his lips. He was beginning to dislike this boy, and also to desire him.

'No,' said the boy so softly that I barely caught his words. He sounded almost sad. 'This cross in the center is inverted, you see, and the line encircling it represents a serpent. A thing like this can trap your soul. Instead of being rewarded with eternal life...you might be doomed to it.'

'Doomed to eternal life?' Louis permitted himself a small cold smile. 'Whatever do you mean?'

'The band is starting again. Find me after the show and I'll tell you. We can have a drink...and you can tell me all you know about voodoo.' The boy threw back his head and laughed. Only then did I notice that one of his upper canine teeth was missing.

The next part of the evening remains a blur of moonlight and neon, ice cubes and blue swirling smoke and sweet drunkenness. The boy drank gla.s.s after gla.s.s of absinthe with us, seeming to relish the bitter taste. None of our other guests had liked the liqueur. 'Where did you get it?' he asked. Louis was silent for a long moment before he said, 'It was sent over from France.' Except for its single black gap, the boy's smile would have been as perfect as the sharp-edged crescent moon.

'Another drink?' said Louis, refilling both our gla.s.ses.

When I next came to clarity, I was in the boy's arms. I could not make out the words he was whispering; they might have been an incantation, if magic may be sung to pleasure's music. A pair of hands cupped my face, guiding my lips over the boy's pale parchment skin. They might have been Louis's hands. I knew nothing except this boy, the fragile movement of the bones beneath the skin, the taste of his spit bitter with wormwood.

I do not remember when he finally turned away from me and began lavis.h.i.+ng his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the l.u.s.t bleeding into Louis's eyes, the pleasure wracking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.

When I awoke, the ba.s.s thump of my pulse echoing through my skull blotted out all other sensations. Gradually, though, I became aware of tangled silk sheets, of hot sunlight on my face. Not until I came fully awake did I see the thing I had cradled like a lover all through the night.

For an instant two realities s.h.i.+fted in uneasy juxtaposition and almost merged. I was in Louis's bed; I recognized the feel of the sheets, their odor of silk and sweat. But this thing I held this was surely one of the fragile mummies we had dragged out of their graves, the things we dissected for our museum. It took me only a moment, though, to recognize the familiar ruined features the sharp chin, the high elegant brow. Something had desiccated Louis, had drained him of every drop of his moisture, his vitality. His skin crackled and flaked away beneath my fingers. His hair stuck to my lips, dry and colorless. The amulet, which had still been around his throat in bed last night, was gone.

The boy had left no trace or so I thought until I saw a nearly transparent thing at the foot of the bed. It was like a quant.i.ty of spiderweb, or a damp and insubstantial veil. I picked it up and shook it out, but could not see its features until I held it up to the window. The thing was vaguely human-shaped, with empty limbs trailing off into nearly invisible tatters. As the thing wafted and billowed, I saw part of a face in it the sharp curve left by a cheekbone, the hole where an eye had been as if a face were imprinted upon gauze.

I carried Louis's brittle sh.e.l.l of a corpse down into the museum. Laying him before his mother's niche, I left a stick of incense burning in his folded hands and a pillow of black silk cradling the papery dry bulb of his skull. He would have wished it thus.

The boy has not come to me again, though I leave the window open every night. I have been back to the club, where I stand sipping vodka and watching the crowd. I have seen many beauties, many strange wasted faces, but not the one I seek. I think I know where I will find him. Perhaps he still desires me I must know.

I will go again to the lonely graveyard in the bayou. Once more alone, this time I will find the unmarked grave and plant my spade in its black earth. When I open the coffin I know it, I am sure of it! I will find not the mouldering thing we beheld before, but the calm beauty of replenished youth. The youth he drank from Louis. His face will be a scrimshaw mask of tranquility. The amulet I know it; I am sure of it will be around his neck.

Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain...the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his. I will feel the sensations Louis felt: the shrivelling of my tissues, the drying-up of all my vital juices. I care not. The treasures and the pleasures of the grave? They are his hands, his lips, his tongue.

The End of the Garden.