Swamp Foetus (6 page)

‘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, advertisements 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 glasses. 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 glass 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 clubgoers 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 glass seemed to pull the taller boy’s eyes askew. ‘Caspar 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 cunt 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 glasses, 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 glass after glass 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 glasses.

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 lavishing his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the lust bleeding into Louis’s eyes, the pleasure racking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.

When I awoke, the bass 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 shifted 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 quantity 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 shell 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.

(1989)

1960

When the hand snaked out and dragged him into the alley, the boy’s only emotion was a sick sense of I-told-you-so. He’d known he couldn’t make it home safely.

There had been a new book about magic at the library. Reading it, he’d lost track of time, not knowing how late it was until Mrs. Cooper reminded him that she had to close up in fifteen minutes. His parents would be furious. He’d rushed out of the reading room and down the stone steps that led to the sidewalk, having taken only the time to close the book reverently and slide it back into its own space on the shelf. Even in a hurry, he had loved the newness of the red leather against the older, more faded cloth covers.

He had never been out by himself so late at night.

Somehow the night allowed familiar things to change their forms. Bats swooped around streetlights; they seemed too low, almost brushing the top of his head with their skittery wings. Two bristling, pointy-eared things darted across his path, and he jumped back and made an involuntary little sound in his throat. That was when the hand closed around his neck.

It dragged him into the alley and held him tightly against itself. His face was buried in the folds of a dress or cloak. A pungent, musty smell squirmed up his nostrils. He was unable to cough the dust away. He began to choke. Then the hand was at his mouth. The fingers, hard, dry, and impossibly sharp, scrabbled at his mouth. It was trying to force his lips apart.

He twisted his face away, clamping his lips tighter than he had thought possible. The fingers dug into his face, wrenching his head back into the folds of the cloak. Something tiny and delicate snapped in his neck. A soft cry escaped him—the pain was sickening.

There were two hands then; one pinched his nose, drawing blood. Finally, unable to hold his breath any longer, he opened his mouth and gulped great gasps of mercifully cool air. The other hand slapped down over his mouth. Something soft and slimy slid past his lips and spread over his tongue. He felt as if a salted slug had dissolved in his mouth. The stuff tasted the way the cloak had smelled, tangy and bitter.

He wanted to spit, but the hand was still clamped painfully across his face. The glob warmed his throat as it slid down. That part almost felt good. The warmth began to spread through him. He went wonderfully limp. His toes and fingers tingled. The hands let him go and he slithered to the ground.

The cool bricks felt good against his cheek. His neck was twisted at an awkward angle, but he no longer noticed the pain. Between the tops of the buildings that soared up on either side of him, he could see a sliver of darkness sprinkled with pinpoint stars. A night breeze brushed over his face and ruffled his hair   as he stared up. The sky was incredibly beautiful. He wanted to sing to it.

1980

The piano keys were bone-smooth and cold under his fingers. He loved the starkness of them, black on white against the deeper black lacquer of the piano. The room was stark too, purposely so. The piano and its bench were the only objects in the room. The floor was of dark polished wood with a honey-golden undertone that made it seem to glow.

He sat with his back to the long window which nearly filled the rear wall of the room. His house sat on a cliff overlooking the sea. When he stood at the window, he could look down at waves crashing and disintegrating on jagged rocks. But he sat on the far side of the room. If he had turned to face the window, he would have seen only a long expanse of gray-blue sky broken by the three heavy crossbars of the window.

It might have been an early morning sky or an early evening sky or a sky about to storm; he neither knew nor cared. He slept whenever he was tired and spent most of his waking hours at the piano. His face, bent over the keys, was serene and nearly expressionless. At thirty, he was almost as boyish as he had been at ten: his body was slim and compact, his unlined pale face overhung by a soft mop of dark hair, eyes like limpid black pools, a serious, sad mouth.

He let his hands wander across the piano keys. The notes rose, clustered, broke away from each other and drifted back down to melt into the golden floor. As they touched his ears, he smiled faintly. It had taken him so long to realize he could make this kind of music.