Crypt orchids, p.6
Crypt Orchids, page 6
The former passenger ferry was sunken stern-down in the black water, its prow jutting weakly up like the nose of a dead badger. The lower decks, once used for automobiles, were probably all flooded. The portable generator was stationed outside the main passenger cabin, theoretically high, dry, and ventilated. It smelled the way a hot car engine smells when gaskets are frying.
“Welcome to Final Rest,” Hraban said, taking pains to point out that FINAL REST had been smeared in all-weather paint near the forward passenger hatch.
Curta KIA entered a tilted chamber containing more than a hundred people in black. Tepid light waned from strung bulbs as the generator yielded to the sound system; dozens of candles were burning. Cold pockets of light exuded chemical scents—vanilla, jasmine, licorice. The vast passenger cabin had been cleared of bolted-in factory issue and was parceled into countless little corners and circles of dim illumination. She smelled beer but did not see much being drunk from bottles or cans; everyone present seemed to have wineglasses or crude pottery mugs that looked home-turned.
Already, white faces were looking and white fingers with ebony or blood-red nails were pointing. Hraban pressed a long stemmed glass of something into her hand.
“It’s mead, I think,” he said over the music, exaggeratedly forming the words by stretching his mouth to and fro, presumably so she could lip read. He came off so funny, like a remedial dope whose medication was kicking his ass, that Curta KIA almost blurted out a laugh. The drink in her hand smelled like urine. Instead of screaming back, she draped her free arm around him and drew him closer, shushing him conspiratorially so she could scope the talent of the room.
Oh-so-tragic, easily cynical, fashionably aloof—Curta saw pale little deather girls and boys, flaunting a caustic disdain for life and each other through the practiced, hooded glance of the faux-aesthete or the defocused fixation of the lotus-eater; their eyes, like Hraban’s, kohled with makeup filched from drugstores. Curta had been prepared for a parade of homeless disaffiliates, squatter kids and layabouts, runaways and blackclad bums sucking on clove cigarettes. Every once in a while, she met one of these poseurs who actually housed a shred of substance or a mote of genuine tragedy. So far, the prospects, like vampires, not only bit, but sucked.
A lot of them affected the expected dull uniformity: the scuffed boots with needle toes, the threadbare denim butts, the rail-lean, chicken-wing physiques with concave stomachs and hairless, larva-white flesh over sunken ribs. More often than not you could pat them down and come up with at least one or two sets of actual handcuffs or a demo cassette.
The fat ones were a hoot. They looked the most like the “witches” and “vampires” trotted onto talk shows every Halloween, always clutching the overweight pop novels that formed their gospel and yammering on about the dark romance of human blood. They were perpetually Becoming some new genus they fantasized would make them less dreary—essentially, a sort of jumped-up marsh leech with a groovy, depressing wardrobe, for whom mere human life was just parasite boot camp. Perhaps that was why they were all so hideously bloated with carbohydrates and saturated fat: practice, practice, practice. Or maybe they just ate all those big, fat bestsellers.
At least the older ones had stories to tell, thought Curta, weighing curse against blessing. This phylum generally exuded the stink of glitter rockers two decades out of step with the planet. They still mourned Ozzy’s leavetaking from Black Sabbath, and performed sink-dye jobs on their thinning hair not so much to stay stylish as to mask the bald spots and encampments of gray. Where the fat ones looked perpetually gorged (not vampiric at all, unless they had vampirized the nearest Der Wienerschnitzel), the old ones secreted needy hopelessness as a communicable toxin. Yes, they were tragic … but it was the low-budget tragedy of a mental case pushing a shopping cart, not the tonier sculpture of a refined, doomed immortal.
Then there were the Others. Genuinely odd or cantankerous, but never turned up high enough. Faint suggestions of the true Gothic, where bold declamations were needed. If they had elegance, it was squandered or over-drugged; if style, it was borrowed from those with an equal poverty of the imagination; if mystery, it was ostentatiously spot-lit. Real mysteries left such as these impatient and whiny. Some were young, trapped in the grip of a transient fragility they would spend the rest of their lives fighting to perpetuate. Some were older, with all the right piercings and scars, the ones with fading tattoos who could feed off you by unspooling the endless saga of the thwarted love or ambition that imprisoned them forever on a giant slide-ride to doom.
They came down here from Manhattan, blinded by mascara and shunning the cancerous sun, from the Carolinas, from Texas, from Seattle, from Iowa, they made hadj, scent-tracking on the blood brotherhood of those they thought to be like themselves—a scatter of outcasts, each the local weirdo of his or her birth town, iconoclasts and mutants, wild individualists sniffing for tribal unity. From Los Angeles they came, armed with propaganda from the Center for Vampire Studies in Pasadena (which documented the frigid, rock-hard fact that more genuine nosferatu resided in L.A. than anywhere else), too stunned or jaded to notice how the cutting edge had sliced them in two long ago. Sooner or later, they all wound up at Final Rest, or someplace like it. “Are you angel, beast, or elder?” they would ask each other, like dogs doing the butt-sniff.
What did they all want? Bands, books and magazines, where to dance, to see live shows, to get inked or pierced. Crash space for travelers. Knowledge for making plastic fangs and fake IDs for big-city clubbing, their righteousness so predictable, their edge theory making them all easy meat.
Hraban left her. More correctly, he was drawn away to be swallowed in the darkness by an intruder who had moved him as effortlessly as sliding a barstool.
“Fuck off, Raven,” said the stranger. “Go fill your hole or I’ll fill it for you.”
Hraban was clearly jazzed by this abuse, rushing to make some sort of point-scoring intro. “Wow, Lawrence, I was just looking around for you, you know? This is—”
“I know who this is,” the taller man said, laying a basilisk gaze on Curta KIA and compelling Hraban into retreat gear with a curl of his thin upper lip. Curta’s hand was arrested in a warm, firm grasp. “Please pardon the Raven. He’s a bit of an idiot.”
Curta squeezed right back. “And you’re Lawrence and you’re really different, right?”
“You have the grip of an artisan. That’s the only common thing about you.” He took the untried drink in Curta’s hand and dashed it to the floor, handing the empty wineglass to Hraban and replacing it, by seeming sleight of hand, with a smaller taste in what looked like a Soviet vodka glass.
Curta sipped the pungent, herbal stuff, politely, her eyes and mouth catching a surprise. Chartreuse, made by someone who knew the right tricks. “You haven’t said anything fascinating yet.”
He ran his index finger across his closed lips. If he repeated the gesture later, it would be to transfer his buzz to Curta’s lips, with her indulgence. “Like many of these”—he indicated the others anonymously present—“I enjoy the beautiful and the disturbing. The ethereal is often the pulse to a darker passion. Unlike them, I won’t bore you by going on about Morpheus’ warm embrace, or how Death is my sanctuary. Most of the campy vampires and fashion road-kill standing around us are too hung up on seeking the coolest death, or, lacking that, the most public melancholy?’
“Some of them are only seeking the right bands to like,” Curta said.
“Point?”
“Meanwhile, you’re bleeding?” Curta pointed out. His cheek on the right side was scraped redly back into his ear.
“A disagreement in the Quarter earlier. No consequence.”
“You’d better avail yourself of a Kleenex unless you want one of these supplicants to lick your face. Might be unhygenic.”
“They’re really not so bad, all in.” The worry-line dividing his brow told her that he already felt he was wasting time with the blah-blah. “I was at your show, at Spasmodique. I wonder if you noticed me.”
“No.”
“That’s not surprising. You spent nearly the whole show staring at everyone else’s work. Madsur shows promise, if not as an Abstractionist, then as a Minimalist.”
“You’re dating yourself.”
“Sorry; I liked the painting too. But not as much as Hidebound. The orphan. The braided orphan, forsaken, yet important in death.”
“Thanks.” She had a Gauloise in her hand and before she could display it, Lawrence snicked an old-fashioned hard-case Zippo one-handed, striking the flint on the way up. She held his hand to steady the fire. “What does it say on your lighter?”
He handed it to her. The inscription was crudely hand-stamped, not a job done for beauty. The words were polished smooth by the passage of years, nearly as illegible as the inscription on a forgotten tombstone:
ONE HAS NEVER
LIVED TILL HE HAS
ALMOST DIED LIFE
HAS A FLAVOR THE
PROTECTED WILL
NEVER KNOW
66-69 PLEIKU
She was silent for nearly a full minute, then said, “You seem very well-preserved.”
“Maybe I’m Undead.” He pocketed the lighter. “Maybe I just eat right.”
“Fighting in public isn’t very self-preservational.”
He smiled his first real smile of the evening. “I enjoy it. Can’t help it, really. I won. I always win. Come with me. I presume you have a purpose for actually being here, and you don’t seem to have the disposition for slumming.”
He offered her his arm and she looked at it. This made him smile again, and he appropriated a candelabra and led her out of the ferry’s main cabin.
“This thing is half-underwater,” said Curta as the echo of their footsteps along the corridor became apparent against the fading music. “What’s holding it up?”
“Cars, I think. Industrial junk. Toxic waste. The odd corpse or two with feet eternally shod in quick-dry cement. That sort of thing. But mostly, cars. The automobile hold was full of scrap from chop shops when this thing was scuttled. Turns out so much junk had been dumped in this bend of the river that she sank so far, and no more.” With a glint of malice he added, “Which means the pile of garbage upon which this ferry is reefed may settle or shift at any moment. Think of that in terms of risk.”
“And you’ve got the explanation as to why this place became Final Rest?”
He stopped walking to answer. That lent weight to the reply, whether Curta KIA cared to notice or not. “It serves them as a Modernist reliquiae, to help them carry out their enactment of places and sensibilities long dead. I really don’t know; moreover, I don’t care. The old cars, the dead bodies—that’s the story. It serves. Alfalfa and the Little Rapscallions back there buy it—as local myth, it’s potent enough and serves the purposes of fear/belief systems, so who am Ito say it’s not true? Why did you come with me, a stranger, away from the crowd just now?”
“You said you liked my sculpture, and you sounded like you knew what you were talking about when you said it.” She treated herself to a long pull of her cigarette; the cherry glowed as if sexually stimulated.
“It touched me. I meant what I said. I saw things like it, a very long time ago. Those things were not attractive.”
She reached out to touch the wall. It was oozing foul-smelling liquid, like the nitred bricks of a catacomb. Sometimes bacteria could oxidize forsaken metal into forms of acid or cyanide. “Careful,” she said.
“But your work took all the ugliness out of those images for me.” He raised the candelabra. There was less ambient light at this end of the ship.
“Where are we?”
“Upper aft passenger deck. If you could see the back wall, you’d notice it was rounded off.”
Curta KIA could not see the far bulkhead, because it was underwater. They stood in a hatchless passage staring down a decline of nearly twenty degrees. Scant feet away, the decomposed deck slid beneath dark, still water like the deep end of a dirty swimming pool. The rank air was alive with mildew and sporulative microbes. Bleached, unidentifiable litter floated without ripples beyond their reach; other sodden castoffs were no doubt stacked up amid mud and swampy decay in the butt end of the boat. The wavering firelight sought to trick the eye make every shadow seem engorged with virulent life.
“Sometimes they come here to shoot up,” said Lawrence. “Sometimes, they die.” He extended his open hand toward the biliously cloaked mysteries of the far side of the cabin, beyond the reach of the light. “I think you may find something you need in this room.”
She fought to stay wry. “I think you’re nuts if you think I’m wading in there alone, with no light and no antibiotics, groping maggoty corpses and grabbing water moccasins by mistake and getting annelids in my boots … Lawrence.”
He chocked the candelabra against the remains of a folding deck chair, which leaned back against the nearby wall on two legs. The candles flickered in protest against the pestilential air they were forced to burn. “You wonder if you are for real, in your art,” he said, solemnly folding his arms. “You judge others without having to prove yourself. I don’t want a treasure hunt. Do I look like some groupie who would wallow in the mud for a chance to fetch you a skull?”
Her body wanted to backtrack, but her ego denied easy fear. “What, then?”
That snaky smile was back. “I want one dance. Dance with me. Show me you are who I think you are.” With that, he held out his arms, and he could not have been more alluring: clean-shaven, clad in black, and smelling faintly of Osiris oil.
Suddenly Curta KIA was notably wet; crimson rose in her like heated mercury and her heart compelled her blood to speed. Maybe Lawrence had hypnotized her. She wanted to ride him hard, grind him to obeisance with her pussy and make him scream when he came. With her excellent grip, she caught the back of his neck and pulled him to her level. Her mouth ferociously pried past his closed lips. He drew a deep nasal breath in surprise, his pupils dilating in the candlelight. She would rape him orally, first; spiritually, last.
And they locked bodies, more collision than embrace, grinding, then caressing, probing hands not removing clothing so much as gathering and redistributing it. They circled, moving away from the hatch, toward the water. It had become like a dare, now, and neither of them had to ask stupid questions about commitment. She pulled his sleek dark hair and forced him to kiss her, the same way she would make him hard and plunge him inside her, but only at the right moment, and only if he gave up the control.
They spiraled together, in a cobra’s mating tango. Now they were knee-deep in the fetid water, feeling semisolid, subsurface items fumble invisibly beneath their footing. Black bubbles coughed up. Any second now, Curta KIA would plunge her spike heel through the rib cage or eye socket of some putrescent, long-deceased grave waver, to sprawl without grace and punch through a bladder of gelid tissue—so much ennui, turned into so much fertilizer.
“There are bodies beneath us, right now,” he said, and she shivered, thinking of age-old chandeliers still hanging in the dark ballrooms of the Titanic. The murky tideline lapped at the floor like a wavering, demi-phantasmic demarcation between nondeath and afterlife.
Lawrence jerked stiff, his hair whipping forward as speckles of his blood dotted Curta KIA’s face. She had to catch him as he slouched, deepening their embrace. As they tipped over backward, she saw the blade of the folding Army shovel that had felled him. She did not see their assailant, only that edge of olive-drab metal swinging back for her as Lawrence’s body bore her down, as surely as any schooled rapist, into the liquid corruption she had feared. She splashed, was held submerged by a hand on her throat and a hand on her forehead as her body fought to flee, to respirate.
Her fingertips seemed two thousand miles away. The septic, black water roared like Niagara. She heard it filling her ears and then there was nothing else.
“About ten years ago, in the Northeast, spruce trees in the higher elevations began to die in uncommon numbers. People blamed acid rain and the scientists didn’t disagree with them. That, and all those coal-burning smokestacks in the middle of winter. But the poisonous rain didn’t just burn the trees as it fell. It liberated the aluminum in the soil, which was then carried into the trees, killing the roots. Now the trees had a much harder time acquiring phosphates and calcium and magnesium from the soil, which was itself depleted by the acid rain. The pH of the air was somewhere between that of lemon juice and battery acid. The forest became a field of gray skeletons. Ever hear of the beech blister?”
Mr. Gaines shakes his head. The thing in front of him is too busy bleeding and lolling in and out of cognizance to fake any interest. He stares into dulled gray eyes, seeking to peel back the thoughts of his prey. Inside that damaged head, nerve endings are blowing out like popcorn.
“No? How about the woolly adelgid? It attacks hemlock?”
Mr. Gaines touches the blowtorch to Lawrence’s left nipple and pushes until the blunt soldering tip sinks into the flesh with a sizzle. Bound to the riveted seat, the taller man arches in muffled agony against his duct-tape restraints. His face turns red, his eyes bug out, and he lapses, twitching. Vent flames from the tip barbecue wispy hairs surrounding the spot where his tit used to be.
“I hate that smell, young man.”
Oh, god, how it is boiling up inside of him, the rage, threatening to percussively deploy the cap of his skull and spray the room with the electric fallout of his anger.
“You know how maggots wriggle inside a carcass, making it appear to move? I saw you infesting the Quarter earlier tonight. You come as a carrion eater, to feed off the corpse of something I once loved. You rape its remains and desecrate its memory. Do you want to know what a vampire is? A vampire is the street bum of the supernatural. Do you want to know about death? I’ll show it to you.”
Mr. Gaines flips the pressure cover off a fifty-gallon drum that has been painted over at least fifty times, its logos and warning stencils long buried. The drum is half full of greenish muck like algae, faintly luminescent. It stinks the way acetone does, but filigreed with corruption, an odor which mentally damaged serial killers often claim to smell—an olfactory illusion particular to their dysfunction. Vapors from the slush sting Lawrence’s bleeding eyes. It is a color not found in nature.
