Gypsy Blood (2 page)

“You don’t scare me,” Carnival lied.

She still didn’t speak. That was okay by Carnival. He didn’t want to hear her say anything. Even with the candle wax he’d plugged into his ears he still didn’t want to hear her speak.

Hurry up, boy. There’s television I need to watch.

“You can’t watch television, Poppa. You don’t have any eyes.”

I’ve got eyes all over, boy. Don’t you ever forget that?

The succubus tilted her head slightly as if she heard Poppa’s grumble which was quite a trick. Darned few could hear Poppa’s loudest yell, yet who could tell with a succubus?

You’re wasting time, boy. Stop thinking so long and move.

Carnival took one step forward. The succubus sighed softly; a dove’s wet coo, steeped in rotting honey. Carnival felt a quiver in his groin like the thrumming of a burning bull fiddle. He picked up the ladder by its middle rungs, hefting it like a picket fence quarterstaff. He grinned at her because it wouldn’t do any good to cry.

“Come on sexy,” he taunted. “Come on you wet dreaming wonder-box”

Carnival kept his eye focused on the crack in the ladder. That was important. Focus on anything but her.

Think of nothing.

Think of baseball.

That’s right lover boy. Joe DiMaggio would know what to do right now.

“Let’s play ball,” Carnival shouted.

The succubus’s sigh grew louder, a record player slowly turned upwards. Carnival felt his blood rush, his dark uncut hair rustling behind his ears like a tiny super-hamster’s cape.

“Come on now, darling,” he called. “Come on cinder-britches.”

The sigh grew louder. Her face simmered. That was the only word for it. It simmered like a pot getting ready to boil, the flesh softly heaving and churning.

Sweet talk her, boy.

“Come on, you mouth breathing bimbette psycho queen.”

Her face stretched and flexed like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

“Open up, baby.”

Her mouth opened into a trapdoor full of secret nightmares. Carnival felt them pulling him closer. He wanted to climb inside that mouth. He wanted to get naked, peel off his skin, climb inside and roll around in his bare buff bones. Damn it. He wanted her. That’s what she did. That’s what her job was. She was a succubus – a bitchling daughter of a yearning want. Lilith’s premenstrual backwash. She was a doorway on two legs. She’d open up and suck a man into a world of darkness and fantasy and raw living hunger - and it was Carnival’s job to stop her.

Gypsies don’t have jobs. Not real ones, anyway.

“Shut up Poppa. I took the job and I’ve already been paid”

Ha! I saw your paycheck, tied up in a pretty blue bag.

Carnival raised his voice, yelling as much at the succubus as at Poppa. “Open wide!”

She opened like a door, a coffin, a canyon, like the mouth of a crescent moon.

He rushed towards her holding the ladder out like a rickety shield.

“Open wide and say aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

He screamed the last word as he rushed in, trying to keep his courage up. It was the only way to keep from pissing in his pants. He felt his feet leave the floor. A pew rushed past, sucked straight into her mouth. The silver-painted nails he’d pounded into the top and bottom rungs of the ladder drew and snagged at the corners of her mouth just as he’d prayed they would.

Now what?

Don’t ask me. You’re the one who insisted on carrying a stolen wooden ladder into a mystical sudden-death showdown.

Carnival hung there, gripping the ladder with every mulish ounce of stubborn Gypsy blood. Her teeth gnashed like churning ivory tombstones, bits of bone and flesh wedged in between them, chunks of flesh colored parsley. Temptation spirits never bothered with dental floss. He stared at the chunks because they were better than staring at that awful darkness down beyond. One of those chunks used to be named Benny. A dead man he’d been paid in blue plastic to avenge.

He felt the ladder give and shiver. The crack in the wood widened. If it snapped he’d be sucked in and gone. He felt the strength running out of him. It would be so easy to just let go and let the succubus swallow him. He started to let go. Why not? It’d be easy. Just give up and let go.

Then he heard Poppa’s laughter.

Let go, boy. Let’s both let go and see what’s inside. Let go, but look down first.

Carnival looked. The bones inside the mouth were moving. He told himself it was the wind but it wasn’t. He watched as a gnawed up nest of knucklebones reached out for him. A masticated skull, castaneting the ruin of its teeth like a clatter of petrified rattlesnakes chattered at him.

Let go boy. They want you to let go. They want your company.

Carnival hung on.

Listen to her boy. The bitch is laughing at you.

She was. Even above Poppa’s laughter.

Listen, boy. She is insulting your mother.

She was. The hellacious Hoover-queen was insulting Momma. That did it.

Nobody insulted Momma.

Carnival kicked at one of her teeth. A molar, maybe. A platter sized molar. The tooth gave way like a well oiled gas pedal. His wind tunnel monkey bars creaked like the mast of a storm tossed ship. The succubus sucked harder. Carnival’s cock hardened. He didn’t want it to, but the situation was worse than staring at a wall full of hard core porn. It shouldn’t have been sexy but it was. His memories flooded in, threatening to drown him. That was her power - to stir up a man’s memories and make him yearn for the rear view mirror.

He remembered his first kiss. The first time he got naked with a girl. The first time he masturbated. The first time he saw a woman’s eyes glaze in that amazing state of torpid satisfaction, following the first mutual orgasm he’d been lucky enough to conjure.

Not that he’d ever stoop to using magic on women.

He had some scruples.

Scruples? You? There are no scruples in screwing, boy. A man will grab what is hung before him.

Carnival kicked another tooth, ignoring Poppa’s misogynist fantasies. He blamed it on the succubus, and took it out on her.

Dance, boy. Kick up a jig. And then you screw her.

“Screw you, Poppa.” Images conjured by the sin-siren’s singing rose before Carnival’s eyes. Flesh, dancing in candlelight, memories of slow wet lips, hot kisses, and the damp moth flutter of a woman’s breath upon the hollow beneath his neck.

He kicked again.

Choke, you pneumatic bitch!

The bones of men were nothing to her but her own bones would catch in the funnel of her throat. At least that was his plan. The second tooth came loose. The ladder bucked and swayed like an acrobat’s spring pole. Her lips puckered inwards trying to cover her remaining teeth.

She wants to suck you, boy. I guess you look better than a bus.

It was a bad joke. Carnival kept kicking, trying not to laugh at how bad it was. The world swallowed inwards. His hair whipped past his ears like a cat of nine thousand tails. The skin of his face threatened to blow loose and blind him. She was choking on her own teeth, catching somewhere in her throat. Carnival wasn’t about to offer her a psychic Heimlich. He was winning but it was happening way too slowly. He felt his fingers giving way. He felt a fingernail folding back and screaming through his nerve-lines. He was losing, letting go.

And then something changed.

He felt strength, strange muscles, moving beneath his skin.

Hold on boy, let me drive.

This had never happened before. Poppa had never moved this close inside him. It didn’t matter. Carnival needed help right now and it didn’t pay to ask the cost. The succubus billowed inside herself. Carnival felt his ears popping like a shout of flattened balloons. She gave one last heave, her face all full and swollen like a burning bright blue birthday balloon. And then it burst. Just as sudden as a bullet, she was gone, sucked into herself, through herself.

The church rattled. The stained glass shattered inwards in an implosion of color and light. The pews heaved about like trailers in a
Florida
hurricane. Carnival felt the aura of the building pull and push itself out of shape. The succubus was a pathway between this world and another and when she’d imploded the real world rushed in a little bit to fill the vacuum. He didn’t know what effect this might have on the future. It didn’t bother him. He was a live-in-the-moment-and-don’t-worry-about-the-cholesterol kind of guy.

It was the gypsy way.

And what would you know about being a gypsy, halfblood?

Carnival smiled. His skin hurt like it had been stretched beyond recovery. His teeth ached and his legs felt like he’d tried to moonwalk down a sledgehammer gauntlet.

“That’s for you, Benny.”

That wasn’t true. He’d done it for more than just Benny. He’d done it for all the homeless men she’d sucked in and eaten before he’d tracked her down to this church. Benny was just the catalyst. The domino that started the whole universe tumbling.

Ha! You did it for a pair of lonely beggar’s eyes. You felt sorry for them.

“The homeless can be useful, Poppa. They see things that more comfortable folk would rather ignore.

And a Rom loves his secrets. Liar. You did it for sympathy. You are weaker than a woman. Some hero. You didn’t fix anything. Benny the bum is still down there. Down in her mouth. Ha!

“She’s gone, Poppa.”

Ha! Nobody ever goes. She’s just moved somewhere else.

“Shut up, Poppa.”

Carnival tried to imagine Benny. Somebody he’d never known. He’d never even heard of him until last week when three houseless men knocked on Carnival’s shop window and hired him to make vengeance. They’d paid Carnival well. Nearly thirty eight dollars in scavenged pop bottles, bagged in bright blue plastic recycling bags. He never would have done it for free. He had some scruples. Hey, Gypsies have to eat too.

Maybe she was hungry too? You ever think about that?

Carnival paused. He let his breath out in a long and tired sigh.

“Great,” he said. “Guilt the pissed-on lily, why don’t you Poppa?”

Carnival walked away, not looking back, trying hard to forget that feeling of someone wriggling beneath his skin. It ought to have been over but it wasn’t. It had only just begun.

Several heartbeats after the door closed behind Carnival, as he walked away from the shaken church, a tall lurching twist of a figure slanted like the shard of a sunbeam from out of the heart of a shadow. It looked around the ransacked church, a prospective tenant sizing up a brand new sublet.

“Yes,” The Red Shambler said. “This will do, nicely.”

And in the darkened heart of the darkest shadow something else watched the Red Shambler.

Something else that couldn’t be seen.

Something that was already making its plans.

Poppa’s laughter echoed through the empty church.

An Evening Caller

D
oris shivered as the night wind whispered down the back of her collar.

Should she do this? Could she? Her mother would have called this a sin. Her mother called a lot of things sins.

She looked at the sign in the shop window.

GYPSY FORTUNE TELLING - BY WALK-IN OR APPOINTMENT ONLY. ASK ABOUT OUR RAINY DAY SPECIAL.

If you couldn’t believe in a sign, what could you trust? There was a sign on the lamppost beside her as well.

JESUS CHRIST SAVES ALL SINNERS. PRAY TO JESUS NOW. OBEY THE BIBLE.

Direct as a drill sergeant. They didn’t call it the Salvation Army for nothing. A basket of biblical tracts sprouted beneath the sign. She picked one of the tracts up.

DEATH, JUDGEMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN OR HELL, YOU DECIDE.

So many messages. Who should she believe?

Trust Carnival, her best friend Margaret had told her. Carnival knew things.

Doris
squared her shoulders, stepped up to the door, and pushed it open.

A little brass bell heralded her entrance.

“Enter freely and of your own will.”

She looked at the man who had spoken. He flashed a quick grin to show her he meant no harm.

“Come in. Sit down.”

Her mother would have called him rough looking. A faded brown suede vest worn too tightly to be fashionable. Tousled black hair, salted with a little age and comfortably uncombed. A scar on his right cheek that made him look dangerous. He had a nice smile but you can’t trust a smile. Jimmy smiled whenever he asked her for money. The man chuckled as if he could read her thoughts.

Maybe he could.

“Come in. Don’t let me scare you. It’s just my idea of a joke. Something I heard in an old Dracula movie,” he said with a shrug. For just a half an instant he looked like her dead husband, Frank.