Gypsy Blood (24 page)

You’re a good boy. Shame is a bad shroud.

Yes, right, thought Carnival. A good boy.

“Let me get a candle,” he said.

“All right.”

He wondered if the shame was always there, even with strangers. Could she hate what she was that much?

Not hate, boy. That degree of shame is reserved for palm readers and lawyers.

“Wow. The place sure smells of pizza.”

Pizza and death.

“Hang on.”

Carnival lit a candle. A little glimmer won’t hurt that much. It was the least he could do.

“A candle’s romantic,” he lied.

That’s a big lie. I’ve seen some of the things you’ve dickered with by candlelight. Some of the bargains you’ve made. And you call me dark.

“Gee,” she said. “You’re a real nice guy.”

Ha. Hear that boy? You are a nice guy.

“I used to dream that I’d meet a guy like that someday,” she went on. “I mean, I know it’s not you or nothing like that. You’re just being nice, is all. But I mean a real nice guy. Someone who’d look at me. Look at what I am. What I’ve made myself.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way.”

Careful Galahad. You’ve pledged your duty to one pair of skinny legs. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

Carnival picked up the box of salt from the floor.

“Why not?” she asked. “It’s what I am. A damn shame, that’s all. I’m a goddamn walking shame.”

Carnival shook his head. “Shame’s what everybody expects us to feel when we do what we know we’ve got to do. Everybody tells us we’re supposed to feel.”

He was talking as much to himself as to the woman. Trying to convince himself not to feel so bad for what he was about to do. She smiled at that. It maybe made it easier. He was just paying a fee, was all. There was no need for shame. “Old hookers like us don’t want to feel anything without a fee.”

Right boy. No need at all. Do what you think you have to.

“I ain’t ashamed,” she said, as if she could read Carnival’s mind. “Just scared sometimes, is all.”

“Scared of what?”

“Scared every night. Scared of the men with faces like credit cards, scared that one of those men was going to kill me. A girl’s got to live that sort of fear, all the time.”

Carnival shook his head softly. He could tell her about fear, he supposed.

“All those diseases out there,” he said. “I guess it can get pretty scary.”

She laughed at that.

“It’s not the diseases. They’re invisible. They don’t scare me. It’s the men. They’re not all nice, like you. Most of them ain’t nowadays. The men who pick me up these days are usually the bad kind. The kind that ain’t choosy. It gets scary, knowing that sooner or later you’re going to see one of them. Smile at them and get into his car. And then he’s going to kill me.”

She smiled up at Carnival like she knew what was in his mind. Carnival busied himself with spilling the salt around the floor. Sea salt is best but the regular stuff worked just fine and it went for half the price.

Salt the meat well, butcher, to keep it from growing buzzing flies.

“What’s all that salt for?”

“It’s a magic circle,” Carnival said, trying to keep the circle as even as he could. “It keeps things pure and clean. Salt’s a universal cleanser.” The easiest way to lie is always tell the truth.

“You ain’t smelled the harbor lately, have you?”

Carnival laughed at that. He couldn’t help himself but he had to watch out for that. He didn’t want to get attached. Sharing a laugh is as personal as sex, if it’s the right kind of laugh. And personal was something Carnival didn’t want. Not with what he was getting ready to do.

“So that salt’ll protect us, while we do it?”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“Are we going to do it in there?”

He allowed her another nod.

“You don’t think you could dig us up a sacred mattress, do you?” she asked. “It might be better for my sacred back.”

“You do most of your clients in that alley, don’t you?”

She looked down.

Ashamed again.

Damn it.

“I just want things to be perfect, is all,” she said. “That salt’s for protection?”

He nodded.

“Kind of like a magic rubber then, isn’t it?”

He laughed again. Damn it. He had to get this over with. No more fucking around. If he laughed again, it wasn’t going to happen.

“You’ve got one of those, don’t you?” the girl asked.

“One of what?”

“A rubber. A safe. You know, a condom. For protection. Like your salt.” she looked down, like these were the hardest words she’d said in a long time. “You’re a nice guy. I wouldn’t want you getting hurt.”

Hell.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about me, girl. I’ve got one right here.”

Carnival reached into his pants pocket, pulled out his knife, and rammed it as hard as he could between the hooker’s breasts.

The ritual had begun.

Meat Grinder Dreams

M
omma lay in her bed, passing time.

She didn’t really know what to do with her time anymore.

Sleeping wasn’t something that came easily to the long dead.

She lay in the darkness, letting her body rest, letting time pass.

There was a spider nestled in a corner. She watched it weave its web.

“Are you hungry, spider? Am I hungry?”

She couldn’t tell. All of these sensations were foreign to her.

The spider kept on weaving.

Momma kept on staring.

When she finally fell into the closest thing to sleep, she was visited by dreams.

Somebody was standing over her.

Somebody was forcing her into a meat grinder.

She kept screaming, but the hand above her kept forcing her downwards until nothing was left but a hand. The fingers and palm opened up into mouths, hungry screaming mouths, and then the hand above her forced her down.

Down, screaming, forcing her, forcing his own hand deep into the meat grinder and letting himself be pulled down after her. At the last she looked up, from the spill and the meat, she looked up at who was forcing her down.

It was her son.

“Oh my son. Oh my Val,” Momma whispered. “Whatever do you think you are doing?”

The spider kept on weaving, spinning out its sticky charm, laying down its ancient design, a trap to keep death out.

Chumming the Waters

I
t had to be bloody.

The kind of spirit Carnival needed would only come to the smell of fresh blood. You can’t catch anything without good fresh bait. So he cut the pieces of the dead hooker and scattered them around the salt circle, being careful not to spill any blood across the salt, for fear of breaking his sanctuary.

The dead girl, you mean.

“You know what I mean, Poppa.”

What you mean? You’ve killed a girl. A human being. You’ve taken her life. You’re not a very good Galahad, are you? Stop lying to yourself. Don’t try to hide behind labels. Leave that to the lawyers in their oily cheap suits.

“And you’ve never done anything as bad as this, Poppa?”

Not like this. This is strong magic. Where’d you learn magic like this?

“What, you thought I had nothing but card tricks and crystal balls? I’m wiser than you think. Wise enough to notice you changing the subject.”

It had to be bloody and it had to be random.

There had to be pieces strewn, like torn tickets at a funhouse fair, dreams of broken stained windows, a mosaic of meat. There’s an art to butchery, an art and a science. Done properly it becomes a kind of divination. The entrails readers of
Pompeii
knew this. The Red Dreamers of Cythoris. The dogmen who talked in blood and tongue meat in the nameless streets of Bel-hal-hai.

It’s a good family tree to piss against, isn’t it boy?

Carnival ignored his Poppa’s jibes, too busy on his incantation.

“Come, dark spirit,” he called, chanting words that clanked in his mouth like cleavers against anvils. “Come red wanderer. I call to the outer dreams of the universe, to the darkness that cannot be touched, I call to the red one’s twisted malevolent servant.”

Demons don’t talk that way.

“I know, Poppa. They don’t talk that way but they like to pretend that they do.”

The shadows in the corners of the room began to swim. Standing and stretching out like a streak of red cinnamon oil that had learned how to walk. And then there it stood, leaning there, just outside Carnival’s circle. So close that he could smell its fetid breath. It stank of curdled blood and greed. One of the countless unsung grotesqueries, raised barely a half a century ago into demon-hood.

Its name was Cantanker but it didn’t know that Carnival knew that.

“Give me the heart,” it begged, reaching one overly long gangle of an arm out towards Carnival, stopping just short of the salt circle.

“I’ll give you nothing unless you talk with me.”

Cantanker’s jaw structure dislocated into the shape of a very large and hungry grin. Cantanker was a low-league grotesquerie, very minor arcane majoring in obsequious carnage, a demon of urges and betrayal.

He would be as good a place as any to start tracking the Red Shambler down.

“Oh we’ll talk of many things,” Cantanker promised.

Carnival couldn’t resist.

“Of cabbages and kings,” he countered.

Then he gave Cantanker a finger.

Her smallest.

“Here! You have my permission.”

The bargaining had begun.

The blood spirit picked up the finger and sucked it like a Pixie Stick. The finger pruned and wrinkled beneath the blood spirit’s lips like a slug under salt.

And then Carnival played his next card.

“I know you by name, Cantanker Pewling,” he said. “You are the itch in the blood that causes a man’s hands to reach for his wife’s throat on a hot summer evening. You are the piss-off, the slow burn, the burr beneath the saddle. You are the bitch-bastard that will not die.”

Cantanker smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was kind of smile that made a man dream of watching the blood run down a white picket fence, after a half dozen babies have been dropped upon the sharpest pickets.

“You have one of those already, gypsy boy,” Cantanker said. “You have a bitch who will not die.”

Carnival grinned.

Cantanker knew things too.

Demons keep up with all the gossip.

“She gives a hell of a hickey.” Carnival admitted. “Better than you’ll ever know.”

“I fucked her in the ass.” Cantanker boasted. “She screamed for more.”

“You fucked your mother while you were both blind drunk.”

This was how demons really talked. Talking with demons, especially the one’s farthest down on Hell’s totem pole, was a little like talking to a pack of fourteen year old boys. The ranker you talked, the more they loved to listen.

“She said you were small,” Carnival added. “Like a cocktail weenie.”

“I fucked your mother,” Cantanker said. “Fucked her with my blood swollen cock. Fucked her until she spat out the cuntworm that grew into you.”

Blood swollen cock? This hell spawnlet’s read too many Forum letter columns.

“Ha!” Carnival retorted. “My mother would kick tombstones up your poor buggered ass until your eyes crossed in shame.”

The black banana peel of pride goes slick and fast before a tumble.

“To hell with that, demon. You can talk about my girlfriend all night long, but nobody talks down Momma.”

Ha, listen to the Momma’s boy.

It was awkward, trying to converse with a demon while Poppa
kibbutzed
. Cantanker hissed, trying to spray Carnival with his toxic blood. The blood spew hit the wall of the salt circle and sprayed out in midair, like reddish green mud splashed on a thin invisible circular windshield.

“Tell me what I want to know,” Carnival demanded. “Or I’ll keep you here all night.”

“You can’t keep me. I have work to do.”

“Yes I know. There’s a drunkard six blocks aching to beat his wife’s skull in with her favorite bowling trophy. There’s two friends arguing over a pack of cigarettes and one of them has got a knife. There’s a mad dog itching to tear the throat out of a beggar’s child. You’ve got work waiting for you but right now you’ve got to deal with me and I’ve got you hard and fast - and neither of us are going anywhere until I hear what I want to know.”