Untitled 12

Caitlin R. Kiernan

As it turns out, finding her was the easy part, as easy as falling off a log, as easy as pie, as easy as you fucking please. I spent so many years preparing myself to begin looking – years and years and finally a whole decade seeking out those frightened old men hoarding secrets, the mad women guarding forbidden and forgotten books, years committing all the usual indiscretions and blasphemies that might finally make me suitable in her eyes, if I could ever find her. But I doubted I ever would. I would search, I thought. I would search as diligently as anyone had ever searched for anything, holy or unholy. I would likely search my entire life away and, as with all the others before me, I would only find hints and rumours; there would be times when I’d come so, co close and that would seem some capricious agent was leading me, surely, coaxing me, feeding me the right leads only to steer me astray at the very last moment. That’s what I’d been told to expect, and that’s what I’d read in the books – Unaussprechlichen Kulten, De Vermis Mysteriis, Livre d’Eibon and so on and so forth – pages too brittle and stained to read, riddles too oblique to fathom, all of it spiralling deeper into the certain despair that I was only an idiot chasing a myth that had never possessed more substance than the ramblings of schizophrenics and liars. And then, one night, she found me. Weeks after that I don’t recall, darkness until I woke somewhere unfamiliar, sick and sweating in half-light and shadows, sick as a junky going cold turkey; the high walls, bare masonry, bricks and mortar, fire doors scabbed with rust, the constant sound of water dripping somewhere. I lay naked on a bare mattress soaked through with blood and piss and mildew, realizing, slowly, that I’d been beaten almost to death, maybe more than once, that there were broken bones and missing teeth. The pain made me want to climb back down into the numb, insensible darkness. But she crouched nearby, watching me with her ebony eyes. Those secret, ravenous eyes to match the black holes waiting at the centre of galaxies, eyes to devour stars and planets and even time, eyes to devour souls, and when she smiled blood spilled from her mouth and pooled on the concrete floor.

“It’s not a game,” she said and licked at her lips.

“I never thought it was,” I replied, dizzy and slurring the words.

She nodded her head. “Just so we understand one another. Just so you understand me. Just so you know it ain’t–”

“– a game,” I interrupted, and for a moment I thought she might take my head off.

She crawled a few feet nearer the mattress, moving across the floor more like some reptilian thing than a woman, and the faintest, furious spark glinted in her dead eyes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked and more blood leaked from her mouth.

“Do you know what I’ve done to find you?” I said, instead of answering her question.

“Do you think that matters? Do you think that’s why you’re here? I asked you a question.”

“I’m sick,” I told her.

She nodded her head. “You’ll get a whole lot sicker,” she said. “Especially if you don’t eat.”

Then she vomited, a sudden gush of the darkest red across the concrete and the edge of the mattress. It spattered my bare skin, speckling me with half-digested blood. She wiped her mouth and sat down.

“That’s how you start,” she said.

I stared at the cooling puked-up blood for a moment or two and then lay back down on the mattress and stared, instead up at the ceiling of the place, which seemed far, far away. There was glass up there, a skylight, and I could see it was night. I shut my eyes and wondered what it would take to get her to kill me.

“You should hurry. It’s better warm,” she said.

“Can I still say no?” I asked. “Can I change my mind?”

There was a long moment of silence. Maybe she was surprised. Maybe she wasn’t. I doubt I’ll ever know.

“It’s not too late,” she said. “I’ll kill you, if that’s what you want. It seems a shame though.”

Her voice – I wish I could find the language to describe her voice. It has to be heard, I think. It made me want to scramble away on my shattered limbs and hide in some dark hole where she would never be able to follow. It made me want to die.

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” she said. “There will be others. There always are. They will never stop coming.”

“I didn’t come,” I said. “I don’t even know where I am. You … took me.”

“Is that how it was, little girl?” She laughed, licking some of the regurgitated blood from her fingertips. “Well that’s not how I remember it.”

And then she brushed the sweaty hair back from my eyes, her hand as cold as ice across my brow, arctic air against fevered skin, and I shivered so hard my teeth clacked together.

“Don’t look for monsters if you don’t want to find them,” she said.

What had I expected? Some glorious fallen angel, some beautiful Byronic being of light and shadow? Had I really thought she would be beautiful? I’d read enough to know better. But I’d been unprepared for this, this gargoyle squatting there before me, smeared with blood and gore, dirt and shit, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a matted crown, her lean boyish body a road map of scars and half healed injuries. At some point her left nipple had been torn entirely away.

“What? Am I not pretty enough for you?” she asked and bared her teeth like a spiteful child. Somewhere overhead, a bird fluttered about in the criss-cross of steel girders before the skylight. “I thought you were a learned woman,” she snarled. She stood up. And I saw the organ hanging down between her legs. It almost looked like a penis, almost, a stunted penis sheathed in bone or horn, barbed and ridged and misshapen.

“The books,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the thing between her legs, “the books were mostly a waste of time. The men who wrote them … they didn’t know …”

“They never do,” she said, stepping over the cooling pool of bloody vomit. Then she stood above me, glaring down with those hungry eyes, and she began to squeeze the sharp end of the penis thing between her fingertips. “They hide in their rituals and incantations, too afraid to confront what they truly desire. You’re not like that,” she told me

“I’m not? Are you certain about that?”

“No,” she replied. “I’m never certain. But we’ll see. Soon, we shall see, little girl.”

She knelt down, straddling me, and that hard prong, grown stiff now and slightly larger, pressed against my belly. She bent down and kissed me, her tongue darting quickly past my teeth, and I tasted the blood of whatever or whomever she’d killed that night. The taste of blood was nothing new to me. My earlier depredations had seen to that. But there was something more, something beyond the rich, faintly metallic flavour, something like biting down on aluminum foil, something that tasted of mould and molasses and dried thyme. She breathed into me then, a sudden etheric rape, storm wind blown off a tide-less pack-ice sea, her rancid, sweet breath pouring down my throat and filling my lungs. She withdrew immediately, and I gasped, coughed and gagged and almost threw up.

“Don’t you dare let that go,” she warned. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Then she pressed one hand into the sticky-dark pool she’d left for me beside the mattress and smeared it across my breasts. There were bruises there, bruises and cuts and maybe broken ribs, and I shuddered at the pain and the cold of her touch but managed not to cry out.

She was smiling as she painted my chest. “It isn’t in the blood,” she said with a smirk. “That’s what they all think, I know. But they’re all wrong. It isn’t in the blood. Aren’t you hungry yet?”

I looked up towards the skylight again, fifty or sixty feet above the floor. Where was that sky? What constellations gazed down on us? Maybe we were no longer even in a world with stars. Perhaps, she’d dragged me away to somewhere else, somewhere the star-shine was too afraid to follow. Some decaying anti-room of one or another lesser hell. I shut my eyes and tried to let it all go, every thought that stood in-between me and the demon I’d spent so long trying to find. I had come looking for her, and she had found me

I opened my eyes as the thing between her legs slid into me. There was pain, but not so much as I’d expected.

“Yes,” she sighed, grinding her hips against mine. “You’re still here with me, little girl. Maybe you’ll stay after all. Maybe you’re what you always thought you were.” And then she leaned closer, her spine arching like the back of a cat, like the spine of nothing human, and her long, rough tongue began licking away the blood on my breasts, taking little bits of skin with it. Her breath in me, taking me more surely than any mere sexual act, taking me and taking me apart. Cunningly altered molecules of oxygen and hydrogen splitting the cells of my body, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, mundane gases rendered impossibly exotic to divide mitochondria from their DNA, to divide the nuclei of my body to supernova. I wrapped my legs around her as her organ probed deeper, tearing me up inside. This was utter dissolution. Alchemy too sublime and mercurial for crude earthly chemistries. The rupture of membranes to release floods of cytoplasm as she had her way with me. I could feel those barbs, digging in so deep I’d never get her out. No going back now, and nowhere left to go back to, because I’d gone looking for her, and she had noticed.

“What’s happening to me?” I asked her, the guttural grunt of some animal escaping my lips, almost, but not quite formed words.

“Don’t you know? Lead into gold,” she whispered. “Water into wine. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

I closed my eyes. Isn’t that exactly what I’d wanted? The concrete below me crumbled and fell away, or it only seemed to, and I was tumbling into some pit for which a bottom had never seemed necessary. Crossing distance that was not space or time and she was still inside me. She would always be inside me. She kissed me again, and blood flowed from her mouth into mine. Her short nails dug into my sides, puncturing skin and muscle and scraping bone, and an instant later her lips pressed to my left ear. There were words – promises, threats, taunts, but none of it as important as her voice. The words themselves were irrelevant, mostly, only there because the voice had to take some form. It was the voice of this consuming pit, and in it I heard the aeons and saw the feral creature for what she was, saw the primordial forests she’d stalked, the glacial wastes and caverns, the necropolises and catacombs of vast cities gone to dust 10,000 years before the coming of mankind. She was there through it all. She is the constant. She is the rising of the sun and the setting of the moon. Her jaws clamped tightly about my throat, her long canines and incisors opening up new wounds, releasing more of me into the chasm rising up around us.

“No doubt,” she whispered, the wind and darkness tearing her words away almost before I could hear them. “No doubt ever again.”

“We’re going to fall forever,” I replied, surprised at the resignation in my voice. I’d never been so sure of anything in my life.

“That’s up to you, little girl,” she said with a laugh, and there was only a moments confusion before I understood exactly what she meant.

She thrust her hips again, that pulsing shaft of flesh and horn between her legs becoming suddenly an unlocking key, becoming now the holy grail to divide my last resistance, and the deep places of this nowhere rumbled and echoed as we began to rise. The angry, cheated abyss, oblivion’s dragon that much more empty for our retreat, and then we were lying on the mattress again, and I could hear the steady, determined drip of water.

She kissed me once, her lips softly brushing mine, then withdrew and crawled away into the gloom. But I could still see her. With these new black eyes, this new flesh, she could never go so far that I would be unable to see her.

I lay there for a time, until the sun began to rise, shining in dusky cathedral shafts through the skylight, throwing chiaro-scuro bands across the concrete. We would have to sleep soon, but first I rolled over onto my belly and licked away the blood she’d left for me on the floor.