Kissing Carrion (11 page)

I wonder, though. What does a prophet prevented from prophesying feel, exactly? Does it feel relief, freedom, a welcome escape from using and being used in return? Or does it feel loneliness, depression . . . the terrible pain of being left perpetually alienated from its deepest, most integral calling?

Nova Mephitium. It reminds me of the question posed to yet another ancient oracle, the Sybil at Cumae, who grew so old and shriveled that her worshipers were forced to keep her in a huge glass bottle, like a genie. And like some clever Arab giving away his last wish to the genie itself, one supplicant once used his—or her—turn to ask, on the oracle's own behalf: ‘Sybil, what do you want?' To which she replied, wearily:

‘I want to die.'

Thirty years, fifty years, a hundred years: You show no one anything they really want to see, tell them nothing they really want to know—nothing they can profit from, nothing
good
. And then, at the end of it, the ungrateful bastards leave you all alone here in the dark, in the middle of this awful smell, with nobody to even try and understand you but the man who leads gawking groups of tourists back and forth through your hollow guts a minimum of three times a day, seven times a week, fifty-two weeks a year with almost no time off for sickness, vacation or good behavior . . .

Which makes it rather one hell of a lot of time I've spent in here already, really. And I can't believe, what with all the thousands of hours I've spent thinking about this house, Peazant's Folly, its Mystery, one way or another—

—that I've never, but
never
, thought about that before.

Um . . .

. . . just one moment, all right? You—just stay right there, together.
Close
together. And I'll be—right back.

Oh, God.

No, no, I'm fine. Just . . . over there, by the door? The door I
locked
behind us, and I think you all definitely saw me do it—

No,
don't
turn to check—really,
don't. Really.

Well, if you feel you have to . . .

No, you're right. You're right. It's gone now.

Hah.

Well, that was a nice little scare to end the tour on, wasn't it? Things you'll convince yourself you see in the dark . . . might be more fumes left in here than my employers have been letting on, I guess.

And where the hell
is
Stephen, anyway? With those—

—candles.

Fumes.

Look does anybody smell anything, aside from me? I mean—

—something worse?

Uh . . .

. . . maybe that wasn't the best idea, all told. Maybe—I'm just going to unlock the door, and maybe we should all just—leave. Quietly, single-file, like the guidebook says. But, uh . . . quickly, too. Before Stephen decides it's just the right time to finally show up and, um—

—Steve, is that you? You look—
bigger
, somehow . . .

* * *

That same figure you saw inside the Folly's door, back bent, hands and face obscured. Turning with its draped shoulder outthrust, its shrouded hand about rising to reach, to TOUCH . . .

* * *

Oh Christ, it's—it's right
behind
you, right fucking now. You know, the—
Christ
, Steve,
you
know what the fuck I'm fucking talking about—

* * *

‘Sybil, what do you want?' you ask. To which I reply . . .

* * *

—fuck, don't
look
, moron, just
don't
—

* * *

I want to DIE
!

* * *

—STEPHEN, FOR FUCK'S SAKE, DO
NOT
LIGHT THAT FUCKING CA—

SOMETIMES I DREAM
that my father, who's been dead for eight years now, appears at my door in the middle of the night and tells me he's actually been living in another country with a whole new family—but he won't tell me where or who, no matter how I plead and cry. Sometimes I dream of rain. But mostly I dream of Yle'en, the Drowned Land. I dream of the Twins and the Green Lady, of the Monocle, the Hammerheads, and the Unseen King. And that frightens me.

* * *

There were five of us in the game of Yle'en—Mary, and Eunice, and Ray, and Trevor, and me. We were all quite young when it began, friends mainly by virtue of our shared pain. We met at school. Hurried conversations in the yard at recess soon revealed our remarkable similarities. Mary and Eunice received midnight visits from their live-in uncle, as I recall, while Ray's highly religious relatives' ideas about child-rearing had left him with an awful stutter. Trevor's father ignored him. Mine beat me. We would all have gladly traded places with each other. That not being possible, we escaped—as far as we could—into Yle'en.

We were model children, all told—quiet, neat, polite. Our bruises kept well-hidden under slightly unseasonable clothes, we faced the world each day with the calm aplomb of prisoners of war. We never talked back, or broke things, and didn't seem actively unhappy. We simply hadn't the strength to be.

So we created Yle'en, which slowly gained strength enough for all of us.

Eventually, we grew apart. Our time in hell done, we exploded out into the world, and haven't stopped moving in completely different directions since. Ray lives with his lover in Vancouver, making sculptures from “found objects.” Eunice has three kids of her own. Trevor is a homicide detective in Winnipeg. I'm still in Toronto, working for an ad agency. You may have seen a few of my commercials for beer, cars, or the Canadian National Exhibition. I put in too much overtime, drink more than I should, and—once every two years or so—precipitate a brief but painful affair by picking up a similarly ambitious young woman in a downtown gay bar. Late at night, I often go into the bathroom and press a lit cigarette into the crook of my elbow. Just to prove that I'm really alive.

But Mary is dead.

* * *

Yle'en is a cold place with a very rigid hierarchy. Being more than a little intimate with the power of fear, we populated it with the things we each feared most. I contributed my twin brother Ian, who fell from a second-story window when we were five. His memory took fresh significance as the glass-armored Twins, one of whom lies forever coiled inside the other like a twisted reel of tapeworm. Ray, who had a morbid dislike of flowers, which possibly stemmed from his love/hate relationship with female genitalia, remade himself as the Green Lady—her arms and her legs articulated like a praying mantis's, her face a ravenous lily. The Monocle was Trevor's father's geometry set—Yle'en's executioner, cutting variables viciously down to size with his razor-edge calipers. Eunice's repressed rage finally found form as the Hammerheads, a whole shoal of sleek, stupid ghost-sharks bent on mutilation.

And Mary was the Unseen King.

She brought a book on Antarctica to school one day and spread it out excitedly beneath the jungle-gym. “The most inhospitable place on earth,” she called it. Faced with the facts, we had to agree.

Turning and turning at the world's utter end, breaking apart only to reform again with a slowness which makes fossils seem hasty, Antarctica is an abstraction made real upon which nothing was ever meant to live for long. It
is
nothing, an inexhaustible waste stretching as far as the eye can see—numb, blind, and devouring.

It was the way we felt. We loved it for that, and made it our own.

In Yle'en, no clocks run. In Yle'en, the ice is made of glass. It freezes the breath solid in your lungs everywhere you touch, choking you, cutting you to the bone. Blood is its art, cruelty its highest form of compliment. Our horrid avatars move with ritual politesse across its blank, lidless eye. Their hunger is an incurable virus running rampant and unafraid across the crevasses, inexorable.

We exiled our parents to Yle'en daily, and tortured them without pity. We murdered countless generations there, and reanimated them to face the knives again, at a whim. We exterminated a slew of civilizations, just for fun. And, along the way, we instilled Yle'en's citizens with our own values—the wit and wisdom of abused children, laid down as unbreakable law.

We took comfort in it, outgrew it, and forgot it.

But it never forgot us.

* * *

A week before she died, Mary called me up. I had just broken with Babs for once and for all, and was drowning my sorrows with crème de menthe in the kitchen. I let the phone ring ten times before I picked it up, more out of respect for the caller's tenacity than curiosity.

“Hello, House of Pain.”

“Zara?”

I sat straight up when I heard the voice. Not just because it had been six or seven years since the last time, but because she sounded so desperate—as if her telephone box were underwater, and slowly springing a leak.

“Mary, where are you? Christ, it's been—”

“Zara, it's coming,” she said.

I absorbed that. “What is?” I asked, finally.

“Yle'en.”

There was a pause. She spoke across it, the words tumbling out without waiting for a response. Like a cry for help, or a confession.

“Trevor's father is dead. They found him at home, all over the place—upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber. Blood everywhere—but it wasn't liquid or dry. It was frozen.”

A bird tapped lightly at my window, making love to its own reflection. Probably deranged, as most city animals soon become.

“And Ray's aunt, too. She suffocated in bed—her lungs were full of pollen. The cops said the whole house smelled like lilies. When they broke the door down, it was so cold they could all see their own breath. Zara, this was in August.”

I studied my right hand. My cuticles were speckled with what my father used to call gift spots, but which I later discovered to be the residue of slow-healing bruises on the flesh beneath. Apt.

Mary was still ticking off her mental list. “And then Bob Shand—you remember our uncle? It got the bastard in September. Dogs, the cops told Eunice. But she knows better, and so do I.
Dogs
don't leave triangular bite-marks.”

“I would've thought you'd be glad to see him go,” I said. “All things considered.”

“I was, that's not the point.” She paused. “I've been in therapy for a while. It helped a lot. I managed to forgive some people—my mother, for one. But they found
her
last night, in her car, in the river. Floating in a block of ice.”

The sun stood still and white in a pale grey sky. Beyond my garden, people were laughing.

“Have you called the others yet?”

“Of course.”

“And what did they say?”

She sighed. “Eunice didn't want to be bothered. Ray told me to get professional help. Trevor's line's been disconnected. Zara, they've changed so much.”

“And I haven't?” I felt like giggling, but my mouth wouldn't move in the right direction.

Silence and hissing, across the miles. Then:

“I've been thinking about it. There's one chance—slim, but I've got to take it.”

“Which is?”

“I was the one who started it all. I showed you guys the books, I sowed the seeds. I'm the Unseen King, right?” Her voice quavered. “If anyone can stop Yle'en—reason with it somehow—it should be me.”

“And if you can't?”

No answer.

I absently wondered how she planned to whistle them all up. Long-dormant images sprang immediately to mind, but I held onto my stomach, and pushed them firmly back down.

“But it's changed too, Zara,” she whispered at last. “I can feel it. It hates us now.”

“No, Mary,” I said softly. “It hasn't changed. We have. And that's why.”

For a moment, I almost thought that I could hear her heartbeat.

“Good luck,” I said.

“I'll call back in two days,” she replied.

We both hung up at once.

Three days later, the police rang my bell.

* * *

It wasn't much of a surprise, though. Because the same night, about 11:15 p.m., I was looking for a scar-tissueless patch of inner arm on which to test my theory that writing advertising copy makes you a zombie when the bathroom door opened. It was Babs, her face wrinkling in disgust.

“Shit, not this again,” she said.

“Apparently so,” I said. “Forget something?”

She'd used her key to get in, which I—in the heat of the moment—had forgotten all about. I leaned against the bedroom wall as she rifled through our drawers, stuffing odd articles of lingerie into a big plastic bag.

“There's a name for that problem of yours, you know,” she told me. “It's called Borderline Personality Syndrome, and all it takes to get rid of it is a little effort. I read about it in
Cosmopolitan
.”

“A little effort,” I repeated. “Boy, I never would have thought of that. Thanks, Babs.”

And the argument began afresh. I didn't get to talk a lot after that, as she went over the usual complaints with new vigor—my lack of commitment, my lack of imagination, my lack of passion.

“You blame everything about how you've fucked up your life on this thing with your Dad! If
I'd
been abused, I'd at least be sad, be angry, be
something
! But you're just cold, Zara! There's nothing inside you, and that's why you do that to yourself—because you know that if you couldn't feel pain, you wouldn't feel
anything
!”

The gospel according to Babs, drawn from a bevy of self-help gurus, each one devoured, considered, and discarded within a week to make room for the next.

“No one could love you, Zara! You don't even love yourself!”

Cold.

I could see my own breath.

And an overpowering smell of lilies filled the room.

Babs' hand was on the knob when I suddenly yelled: “Wait, don't!”

She turned back. Just for a second. And her lips curled back, showing even teeth.

“You sad bitch,” she said, quietly. And pulled.

The door fell open. Beyond it were the Twins.

And they ate her alive.

I suppose I could have done something to stop them, done anything other than just watch. But I'm not
sure.
Because, as they left, they looked into my eyes. And I saw them smile. Their teeth were made of glass.

Why should they love us?
I thought.
We're their parents, after all.

I might have been able to help her. But probably not. And, at least in that respect, she was right. I just didn't love her enough to die with her.

* * *

I've told you that Mary's dead, but I can't actually say for sure. After all, the police never found her body. Just her skin.

And I've remembered since then that, in Yle'en, the most loving tortures of all are reserved for those guilty of treason.

I really hope she's dead.

I watch the news whenever I can these days. They say that large clumps of ice have formed overnight in the Kansas cornfields. They say that Antarctic explorers were recently surprised to find lilies growing along the southernmost ice-ridges. They say that snow fell in Bombay this year. Only for a day, but even so.

But, as Babs used to tell the office gossips, they say a lot of things.

* * *

Sometimes I dream that I hear great machines grinding away slowly, deep under the ground. Sometimes I dream that my mouth is full of pins. Sometimes I dream of sheep. But mostly I dream of Yle'en, the Drowned Land, whose borders are growing wild as crabgrass and eating whatever they touch. Almost every night now, in fact. And that frightens me more than I can ever say.