Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (27 page)

“
Maintenant vous savez?
” she asks the lovely creature coiled inside the husk of Tess Brockett. “
Pourquoi je ne vous a pas tué
?” Of the more recently devised tongues of man, the nameless woman has always found French the one most suited to victory, and to passion.

“
Je fais,
” it answers, that which is no longer the aging, embittered virgin kidnapped two weeks ago from the platform of the South Platte railroad depot by two Portuguese thugs in the employ of the nameless woman. Both the men are dead now, murdered—like the Chinese tattoo artists—by her own hands and then fed to a sty of convenient and insatiable sows. “But,” this living embodiment of two profane books says, “I would hear
you
say it, for the timbre of your voice is unending revelation.”

“Very well then, Miss,” the nameless woman replies, but first she leans forward to once more kiss the cunt of this flawed and flawless vessel. Even that taste has been altered in the metamorphosis, and she wonders how many men—and women—will die from a single sip of the caustic nectar that now flows from between those southerly lips. “You have surely earned for thyself an indulgence or two.”

The woman who was Tess Brockett laughs, and the shadows beyond the reach of the candlelight flinch.

“By your hand,” the nameless woman says, “or, rather, by the hand of who you
were
before this fortuitous deliverance, many beyond reckoning have been dispatched. Those the world of piety and hypocrisy name wicked—shape shifters, strigoi, ghouls, blood drinkers, goblins and a host of fairy folk, the Children of Cain and the descendants of the Nephilim, all manner of sorcerers and practitioners of arts and alchemies deemed obscene by those who look to the Four Marks of the Church for their direction.”

Another Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt dirigible passes over head, this one departing Cherry Creek and bound for the lush green lands beyond the parched plains, bound for the bustling cities of the East; the nameless woman waits until the noise of its turbines and props have faded to a distant, thrumming bumble before she continues.

“It’s not that you weren’t efficient,” she says, “so long as your goal was merely the elimination of what you hated. But, in a more vital sense, your efficiency was an inexcusably wasteful means to your end. You chose—or could not see clear enough to
have
a choice—not to acknowledge that what can be slaughtered can also be converted. More work, true, I’ll not deny thee that. And always some inherent risk that the conversion might not take, and so you’d have to kill your quarry, anyway. But to not even
try,
Miss,to ignore even the possibility... if you ask me, there is no true evil in all this sorry world more insidious than waste. Indeed,
all
evil may be deemed wasteful acts.”

And
as she listens, the tattoos clothing the vessel that held Tess Brockett have begun their writhing, coruscating dance again, and the nameless woman wonders how long it will be before their bearer has learned to marshal them to her bidding.

“Now, I could have killed you. Though that was neither my wish nor the undertaking with which I was cumbered. Your death would have been the merest flick of a wrist, or the pricking of my teeth upon thine previously frail throat. But in such an easy deed would have lain no glory and no genuine accomplishment. Most importantly, no
perversion
. She who lived as my enemy would have died is my enemy, and while an inconvenience would have been removed from my path and the paths of those whom I serve, and who serve me, there is a sense in which she would have won the contest. You know these things, of course, and you comprehend the truth of my words to the very core of your pneuma.”

“I do, yes,” Not-Tess replies, this sliver of the void wrapped all in passages transcribed both from necromancer Ludwig Prinn’s
De Vermiis Mysteriis
and the equally direful
Cthäat Aquadingen
of some unknown Fourth-Century Germanic wizard, the sheath of her soul inscribed with calligraphy and runes, ideograms and eldritch symbols from Semitic, Gothic, Egyptian, Oriental, Arabian, and Persian
musteria.
“Never break what I can bend,” she tells the nameless woman still sitting in the space between her legs.

“
Molto buon, il mio amore?
the nameless woman laughs, because of those various and recently contrived languages, she has always found Italian best suited to congratulatory pronouncements. “It may seem like a very simple lesson, like child’s play, but look what was required for
you
to finally learn it. Any man or woman may exterminate. I can imagine few efforts that are, in the main, more effortless.”

And staring into the glistening black eves of her Creation, this delicate, indestructible Construct she will soon send out into the wide, wide world, the pale and nameless woman recalls seeing, only twenty years prior, flocks of passenger pigeons fully three miles from end to end, blotting out the sun above the plains, their wings bringing premature twilight to a noonday sky. Now, it is rare to see even a score of the birds at once. And, too, she recalls the vanished herds of shaggy bison, and a captive dodo she once saw in a private menagerie in Utrecht in 1628.

“Extermination does not now, nor will it
ever,
constitute our reason for being here,” she says softly, but firmly, admiring the translucent blue-green ribbons of Minoan rising lazily from the breasts of her prize, whirling upwards towards the transverse beams bracing the garret ceiling, born aloft by the breath of their own being. “Let the idiot sons and daughters of Epimetheus pull triggers and crush skulls between stones and set fire to their own. Let
us
mold and configure and frame. Let us only wash across the weary shingles of this waning civilization, and, grain by grain, wear it back to silt and slime. Rut first, my love, let us
twist
it in our likeness.”

“I know now that it was not revenge,” says the prize, “what you did to...” And here she pauses, rethinking her words before continuing. “The way you have raveled me and rewoven the skein of my existence.”

“Oh, make no mistake, there was, to be sure, a touch of retribution in mine work,” the nameless woman says and winks a red and golden eye. “I took my fair share of gratification to see the hunter made the hunted, the slayer slain, the dedicated enemy of depravity and teratism made ruined and inimical to all that which she once protected.”

“Then, it was merely justice.”

“Perhaps,” the nameless woman replies, “if there be such a thing as justice for the damned.”

And then, as the vessel before her delights at its own grim emanations—those misty, spinning scraps of thaumaturgy and conjuration—the nameless woman lies down with that which is already quickly forgetting why it ever bothered to be Tess Brockett. What remains of the waning night is filled with the repeated congress of their twining, hungry bodies. Intercourses too refined and furious, too vast and altogether fateful, to ever be called lovemaking. They devour one another, and are each consumed. They revel in the outrageous excesses of their mutual and individual aberrations. And, finally, as the jealous sun rises above the prairie and illuminates the scrubby Chippewan foothills, the two of them find in sleep the soothing umbra that will shield them all through the scalding indifference of the coming day.

“I never much cared for those stories,” the changeling woman says, staring out at all the fresh snow blanketing the rooftops and streets and the stingy front yards of Federal Hill. The January storm that began just after sunset is finally starting to taper off, and the woman sits at the little table by the window, cleaning her guns and watching the large, wet flakes spiraling down through the orange-white glow of the streetlights. The lean young man whom she has taken as her odalisque is lying naked on the narrow bed, not far away from her. In the room there are only three pieces of furniture: the little table where the woman cleans her guns, the narrow bed where the man lies wrapped in a dingy patchwork quilt, and the creaky wooden chair in which the woman is seated. The only light comes from the window and a small desk lamp sitting on the floor near the foot of the bed. The lamp has a stained-glass shade, but the shade is cracked and so dusty that it’s hard to make out any sort of pattern or the particular tints of the glass. The oyster-colored walls are bare, save for a single framed tintype photograph hung above the headboard. Neither the man nor the changeling woman know the provenance of the photograph, and it might have been hanging here since long before either of them were born. It shows a nude woman standing in some sort of washtub or basin, a very large python cradled in her arms, and someone has written the names Biancabella and Samaritana across the bottom of the tintype in sepia ink.

“They’re marvelous tales,” the young man says very quietly, not precisely contradicting her. All things considered, the changeling woman is not unkind, at least not to him. Tonight, for instance, she brought him a pint bottle of Jacquin’s ginger-flavored brandy. She opened it after they fucked, and now he’s pleasantly drank, and grateful for the gift, which has helped to push back the cold air and the raw sound of the wind blowing hard around the eaves of the terrible old house on Federal Hill.

“After all the trouble they’ve caused you,” she mutters and shakes her head. The woman wets a bit of fabric with forty-weight Remington bore cleaner, then uses a metal rod to work the cloth back and forth through the barrel of the revolver. She does this several times, then stops and stares at him.

He smiles and stares back, and she wonders, not for the first time, if the things he knows and the months he’s spent in the stables might have unhinged his mind. Not many last as long as he’s lasted, the men and women kept downstairs, inside the filthy cages built into the subbasement of the old house.

For more than two centuries now, this placc has served as a refuge for the Children of the Cuckoo, those stolen as infants and raised up in the warrens below College Hill to labor and officiate for the Hounds of Cain, to walk abroad in the day-lit world where the ghouls dare not venture. Those trained to see to the Hounds’ more prosaic concerns, and to make certain that their secrets
remain
secret. To kill, or only maim, or perhaps merely intimidate, as necessary. In all the city, it is only within the walls of
this
house that the changelings are safe from the watchful eyes of their taskmasters. There is no other sanctuary afforded them, no other place where they may do as they please without fear of recrimination.

“It’s not such an awful price to pay,” he says, “not for the privilege of knowing, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there are still such wonders among us.”

“I’m never going to figure you out,” she sighs, and glances at the window again, the window and the subsiding storm, the snow and the heavy winter night crouched above Providence.

“No,” he agrees. “I don’t think you ever will. Now, do you want to hear the story or not?”

“You didn’t grow up on that crap. It’s not the same for you as it is for me.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” he tells her, and considers having another sip from the bottle of brandy. It’s still more than half full, and sitting on a corner of the little table just beyond the edge of the bed.

“I think, maybe, that’s because it’s disguising another question altogether, and I’d
prefer
to answer the one that you’re
really
asking me.” And then she goes back to working on the revolver.

“Fine,” the young man says, and reaches for the bottle. “Would you please
allow
me to tell you the story?” He sits up and unscrews the plastic cap, then tilts the pint to his lips. She laughs again, and nods her head.

“And the truth shall set you free,” the changeling woman says, selecting the brass bore brush from her tools.

“You probably meant that to be ironic,” he says, twisting the cap back onto the bottle of brandy and returning the bottle to it place on the table. “But I don’t take it that way. Finding those books, reading what I read, having
seen
what I’ve
seen,
it truly
has
set me free.”

She puts down the bore brush and goes back to watching the snow. “It very nearly got you killed,” she says. “But, the Hounds took pity, or what they consider pity. So, instead, you live in filth, in a pen, like an animal. Instead, you’re a slave and a whore.”

“Yes,” he replies. “I do. I am. But that doesn’t change what I know, nor in any way lessen the sublimity of the knowledge. What has become of me, it’s only the
price
of the knowledge.”

“I still don’t know why they didn’t just kill you outright,” she sighs.

“I have no idea,” he says. “Perhaps we don’t give them enough credit.”

The changeling woman laughs, shaking her head again, and she reaches for the ginger brandy. “Yeah, sure. They’re sweet as you please, given half the chance. Sweet as strawberry rhubarb pie. Regular fucking teddy bears, and here
we
are, the two of us, living proof.”

“Here we
are
, regardless, and that’s more than I expected. May I please tell you the story now. It really is one of the very best, in my opinion.”

“They’re just stories,” she says, “though it’s beyond me how you remember them all. You couldn’t have had the
Red Book
all that long before they caught on.”

“It’s one of my favorites, this story.”

“I already told you I’d listen, but it better not be ‘The Fisherman and the Djinn’ again, or ‘Gulnare of the Sea,’ or any of that silly shit about Ali Baba or Sinbad the Sailor.”

“It isn’t any of those,” he assures her, lying down on his back and staring up at the water stains and cracks in the ceiling.

“And nothing about Esmeribetheda and the damn grey witches.”

“It’s not,” he says.

“I’ve already told you, I have to be out of here and on my way down to Warwick by three, so you best keep that in mind.” She takes a long, hot swallow from the bottle, then wipes her mouth and rubs at her eyes, trying, and failing, to remember the last time that she got a full night’s—or day’s—sleep.