Aaaiiieee (25 page)

But her voice sounded above me, as if to soothe my nightmares. “Shh, it’s all right. We have all night. We have as much time as you want with me.”

She leaned off me enough for me to slip wetly out of her, and I looked. She had taken a knife from the bedside table. Alarm flushed through me; it was some kind of buck knife, cruel-looking. But she unstraddled me and sat on the side of the bed to saw at the cord binding my feet to the door knob. It didn’t take much; the blade was so sharp. I watched the muscles shift slightly in her back as she worked, a beautiful white expanse of skin. There was a small brown mole on her back. A ghost with shifting muscles, a mole on its back. A wet vagina, and breasts that tasted of musky flesh…

Turning her head to smile at me over her shoulder, her hair in sexy disarray around her face, Mother said, “I didn’t mean to scare you this way, darling, but if I didn’t tie you up you would have run away before I could convince you to stay.”

She ran the flat of the blade over my thighs. I was careful not to move. “Next time you can tie
me
up…”

And I did.

*     *     *

For three days I called in sick at work. I think I told them I had a sinus infection.

We dragged the mattress off her bed and into the studio. We kept the shades down in the day. On the bare mattress we tangled like wrestlers, grinding the bones of our thin bodies together. I buried my face in the shadow of hair between her legs, so fervently that one might think I did indeed intend to crawl back into that place of my origin. I held her head down against my crotch, white-threaded black hair through my clenched fingers. She rode atop me and cried out in orgasm fiercely, digging claws into my breasts while jolts went through her entire frame. For a ghost, she definitely sweated. If she were only ectoplasm, then the reality of the entire universe was in question.

On the evening of our first day we lay together exhausted, not touching, chilly as the air cooled the sweat on our bodies. “How did you get here?” I asked her at last. Since the previous night, I hadn’t allowed myself to think clearly enough to vocalize anything other than gasps and groans.

“You wished me here. You rubbed the magic lamp, honey.”

“That ball. In the skull. I touched it…”

“It was your thoughts more than your touch.”

“So you’re an illusion the ball is making?”

“No. It remade me. It cloned me from what it could gather of me.”

God—I realized it. The dust. Skin cells…

“But what is it? Where’s it from?”

“I don’t know everything, but it’s a probe. It launched with a crew aboard it. They were just a few scraps of tissue that were to be automatically cloned when they reached their destination. Perhaps they were, and are out in the world somewhere. Perhaps they’re still trapped inside. But their computer resurrected me. It’s screwed up and thinks it’s doing its job. All this I know intuitively”

“And did you know this when you found it, or only since it remade you?”

“I’d seen it do this before, with someone else, seven years ago. Out West. Just from a hair between the pages of an old book. So I began to understand it then, and I know more now. But that’s all I know.”

“Why are you this age, though? Not fifty-five?”

My mother smiled, reached lazily to stroke my hair. “This is the age you best remember. You were ten. You thought I was beautiful. And you were looking at pictures of me the other day. You remembered me this way, very strongly. You brought me back. Your love. And your lust.”

“I never lusted for you.”

“Boys learn to love by lusting for their mothers; it’s the natural process.”

I sat up. “Bullshit. I missed you as my
mother.
I
just wanted to have a mother…”

I gazed around the studio. Our loyal audience of death’s heads, those empty-eyed voyeurs. The transformation of the skulls was continuing. All had antlers like branches, gnarled and spreading, a bare birch forest ringing us. Four sets of antlers had grown from the skull with the sphere, these arms reaching the ceiling and spreading to either side impossibly. The cow’s own eye sockets had filled up with bone, leaving only that black cyclopean orb.

Mother gently took my arm, pulled me back down beside her. And we barely left the room for the two days that followed.

On the morning of the fourth day I awoke to see that the branches of the skulls surrounding us had reached and fused with each other, created a jagged white nest around us. Or a barrier, trapping us together. Digits of bone had stabbed into the plaster of ceiling and walls. It was as though we were hidden in the heart of some coral reef. Swallowed in some great skeleton. Would the ring close in on us, until at last we truly were trapped? Until we were crushed, ground in those white fangs?

Mother slept. My stomach grumbled hungrily but I ignored it. Sitting cross-legged, I pulled toward me a stack of scrapbooks I had been meaning to page through. More of Mother’s art photographs.

In the last book I found a series of enlargements that stunned me. They were of Mother naked…but older, in her late forties I guessed. Gray hair. Ass widening and breasts sagging. She was bound and gagged in one shot, sodomized in another. Her male partner in these photos was a man about her age, gray- haired, tall and lean and…and with horror, I realized it was my grandfather. My grandfather, in his forties, having sex with his daughter, in her forties…

She had told me that she had seen the sphere at work before. Seven years ago, out West. Another ghost like her. Her father…as she best remembered him. As she had subconsciously called him back. And now I understood my grandfather. I understood my mother. Even as I felt sick, I pitied her. And I pitied myself, in turn.

But it didn’t stop me from doing to her what grandfather had done, when she awakened…

Mother straddled me again; she liked that control of movement. But she also liked submission; just before this, she’d had me tie her and spank her bottom until it glowed. She rocked atop me now, green eyes drugged in her intensity.

“You missed me, darling. You gave me life as I gave you life. We understand each other. We’re alike. No one else understands us. We need each other. Don’t ever leave me, darling, I missed you, I missed you, I love you, oh fuck me, darling, fuck me…”

Mother leaned her breasts down to dangle in my face. Thinking this was her intention, I sucked at them, but she sat back up and I saw the buck knife in her fist. And I realized she meant to use it.

“No!” I blurted, thinking she intended to kill me; that I might be resurrected and be all the more like her.

Mother plunged the knife down into her own side and cried out as if in orgasm. Blood spattered my belly, then began to flow hot down her body—down mine.

“Fuck me, darling, cut me, fuck me, please…”

“Oh God!”

She raised herself off my erection, took hold of it, and guided me into her incision. She bore her weight down and I slid inside easily amid the lubrication of blood. Her guts were hot in there.

She pushed the knife into my hand. I tried to hurl it away but she closed her fist around mine. She was strong, or I was weak, and she made me thrust the blade into her navel. “Cut me, darling, hurt me, love me, please…” She was sobbing hysterically. Maybe it hurt, or maybe it was the madness. I was sobbing, and now vomiting. I wrestled with her, both of us so slick it would have been hard for another to know which of us had been stabbed. I managed to roll her onto her back and began to slide out of her but she pulled me atop her, legs clinched around me. She inserted me into the second incision. I could barely get in against the push of her intestines, which began to emerge like a blue baby crowning, but I made it, to the hilt, my penis a knife, and I realized then that I had fought to bury my penis in that wound—that she no longer had to force me…

She fellated me through a hole in her cheek. The first wound had healed without leaving a scar, the second was mostly healed, but I made new vaginas. One in her thigh so I could rub up against the bone within. The mattress was awash in blood, a pool in its center. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse must. There was vomit, and a heap of intestines but apparently she regenerated new ones inside, apparently she was immortal, and I heard the creak of the skulls around us as the bone Eden grew more lush.

“Slut!” a voice behind us raged. “God-damn whore!”

I whipped my head around. A man had come into the studio and he smashed himself a path through the bone foliage with his arms, unmindful of the lacerations the jagged branches tore in his flesh. He was naked, and his face was flushed red in fury, and I saw it was my grandfather.

“Bitch! Cheat on me, will you? Run from me, will you? Thought you could hide from me?”

Mother slipped out from under me, and I saw her face was slack with utter terror. All the cat-like confidence had fled her eyes, leaving only that fear I had seen ingrained in them. Hers was the face of a child, helpless to defend itself.

I rose with the knife as Grandfather made it through the barrier. He caught my lunge and swung me aside. He had meant for me to fall into the waiting talons of bone, to become impaled, but I caught myself and only gashed my shoulder.

“No, please, Daddy, please!” Mother wailed.

I tackled Grandfather from behind, reaching around to slam the blade of the buck knife into his chest as I did so. He only grunted, and flipped me off him onto my back. He grunted again as he yanked the knife out of him, and grinned down at me.

“You’ll pay for that one, boy.”

I saw Mother look to the doorway abruptly. Grandfather looked. I looked. A small woman had entered the room through the path Grandfather had smashed. She was naked, and about the age she had been in most of the pictures I had seen of her in the photo album that first night. It was my grandmother.

“Liz!” Grandfather hissed, as surprised as I was.

“Go back, John,” she said quietly.

“No! You go away!”

“I should have stopped you long ago, John. God forgive me…”

Grandmother came forward. Her husband swung the knife threateningly her way. Mother moaned fatalistically. Grandmother moved swiftly past her husband toward the work bench. We all understood what she was reaching for, and as Grandfather lunged to intercept her I tackled him yet again; around the legs this time. He almost fell, pin-wheeled his arms…

I didn’t see what Grandmother with her dead, empty face did when she reached that skull with the sphere in its forehead. I couldn’t see her around Grandfather’s legs. But I knew she had done something when the legs I held became weirdly soft, and then insubstantial…smoke in my embrace. Dust. I began to inhale it, choked, held my breath. The buck knife had dropped to the floor.

I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, facing toward Mother.

Where I had last seen her—cowering on the drenched mattress, that terror in her face—a cloud of dust now hung in the air. For a moment only it held a human outline, as if struggling to retain its integrity, a tormented figure of ash. I thought I saw its eyes, somehow, and I did see an arm. A hand, reaching out to me.

But then the cloud billowed outward, lost its form, swirled and dispersed and settled. Settled around me, on the floor, on the work bench, on the window sill. A sliver of sun showed around the window shade, and motes danced golden in its beam.

I wept. I glanced around me. Grandfather was gone. Grandmother had vanished. Already I heard the cracking and splintering of the bone orchard, as chunks began to break free and drop to the floor.

But the growths weren’t simply crumbling, I saw; they were undergoing some new metamorphosis. I saw a skull begin to climb down the wall off its hook. Its antlers moved stiffly like the legs of some great arthritic spider. It was the skull painted to look like it was covered in flesh and hair. But no, it wasn’t that one. It
was
covered in flesh and hair. One of its eyes was not a broken Christmas bulb. They were both intact. And they blinked.

I ran out of the room then. I saw no more. I found my long forgotten clothing, and my car keys. I heard sounds from the studio, great crashings. I fled outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I had escaped…

I didn’t see what the neighbors saw. No one believed that I knew nothing about it, but no crime was really committed. A few lawns were damaged. I paid for that when I sold the cows.

How had a small herd of cattle been contained inside that house? I couldn’t explain it to the police. I professed not to know. Though Mother’s blood had simply disappeared from my skin, I had been afraid of what the police would find inside…but when at last I had the courage to return to the house, to the studio, I saw that the mattress was dry and unstained—just very dusty.

There were no cattle skulls left in the studio. I collected up the scrapbooks. I would burn the one with the pictures of Grandfather and my mother. And I would sell the house.

I viewed the penned animals once before I sold them. I looked closely at each one of them, felt their foreheads for hard lumps protruding. I found none. Perhaps one day these beasts will be found dead, mutilated, when the owners of the sphere come looking for it. But perhaps it’s already been restored to them.

I couldn’t help but wonder, however fancifully, if the skulls of those cattle were painted black, and red, and blue like a desert sky, under the layers of skin and hair.

I’m better now. Fewer nightmares. I can smile at the people I work with.

But Mother was right, after all; your relationship with your parents does shape how you learn to love, and lust.

I don’t think I can ever have sex with a woman again.

Ouroborus

The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too…squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.