Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (29 page)

The young man nods his head and again screws the cap back onto the pint bottle. “Yes,” he says. “You’re right. But the contradiction is present in the
Red Book of Riyadh.
I’m only repeating it. It’s possible that Ijbeyneh had a change of heart somewhere along the way that the original author failed to note, or that whoever transcribed the story from an older text simply got it wrong. At any rate, I
am
telling the tale just as the book records it. But, if you’d prefer. I’ll gladly backtrack and tell it so that the narrative is more consistent.”

The changeling woman scowls and sighs and tells him no, just get on with it, and so he does.

“When Ijbeyneh saw the men coming up the mountain, she knew, of course, that she’d made a dire mistake speaking with the doves as she had. She understood that the ghulah would either destroy her father and brothers and uncles—whom she did still care for—or else
they
would succeed in killing her beloved Djinn. Wishing to forestall any such bloodshed, Ijbeyneh abandoned her sheep and raced back to the cave where her Aunt was sleeping. She woke the ghoul in time to warn her that men from the village had learned, somehow, that the fair daughter of the woman with seven sons still lived, and now these men were quickly approaching.”

“Had learned
somehow
,” the changeling woman mutters. “Lying little cunt.”

“A lie of omission, at most,” the young man says. “But, regardless, her Aunt told her that, rather than confront the men, there was another way out of the grotto. Or, more precisely, there was a boulder that when rolled back would reveal stairs cut into the limestone, leading down into a great cavern, where an underground lake lapped at subterranean shores. The ghulah said there was a boat there that would ferry them to safety, to the hidden realm of the Ghul, which no man would ever find.

“You can well imagine Ijbeyneh’s profound relief upon hearing this, for she’d already resigned herself to either a violent death fighting at the side of her mistress, or to watching as the men from her family were slaughtered, and then having little choice but to do what was expected of her and dine upon their remains.”

“Poor baby,” the changeling woman laughs. Satisfied that the revolver’s extractor assembly is clean, she goes to work brushing out the cylinder.

“Her Aunt told her to get what few belongings she wished to carry with them, though Ijbeyneh protested that there wasn’t time. The ghulah woman kissed her and told her not to worry, that men were, by nature, slow to find the things they sought, and, since there were so many caves in the mountainside, it was unlikely these men would hit upon the one they were looking for right off. Reluctantly, still convinced they should not be wasting time, the girl gathered up some of the gems that her Aunt had given her, and some of her favorite silks, a crocodile’s tooth, the dagger she’d carved from a vizier’s shin bone, and a few other things. She bundled them together inside a piece of camel hide while the ghulah crouched in the mouth of the cave and kept watch for the men.

“When she was done, the ghulah led her deeper into the grotto than Ijbeyneh had ever gone before. And just as she heard the triumphant shouts of her own father and her seven brothers, who had discovered the entry to the ghulah’s cave, the girl and the Djinn reached the immense boulder concealing the path down to the secret sea below the hills. The ghulah, fearing now that they
bad
indeed tarried too long, shoved against the stone with all her might, only to discover that it wouldn’t budge.”

The changeling woman’s cell phone rings, then, and she sets the revolver down and makes an annoyed, dismissive motion with her left hand, silencing the young man on the bed. He rolls back over on his back and resumes his examination of the plaster ceiling while she talks to whoever’s on the other end. The call lasts less than a minute, and when it’s done, the woman sits staring out the window, cursing the snow.

“You have to go now,” the young man says.

“Yeah, I have to go now. That was fucking Pentecost. I’ll have someone take you back down to the stables. You can have whatever’s left of the brandy I’ll tell them not to take it from you.”

“Thank you,” he says, keeping his eyes on the ceiling, wishing he could have spent the whole night Above, wishing she’d have-stayed in bed after they made love, instead of insisting that she needed to clean the revolver.

He lies still, listening to the January wind, and doesn’t talk while she hastily reassembles the gun. There’s one crack in the plaster that leads all the way from the top of the doorframe, across the ceiling, to the wall above the headboard, and it reminds him of a river glimpsed from orbit, wending its way along a wide desert plain.

“So...” the changeling woman says, “what happened? Did they get away? Or did goat-cheese girl’s father catch up with them?”

“It’s complicated,” he replies.

“Is it now?”

“Very much so,” he says. “A shame I don’t hare time to finish the story. Maybe...”

“... next time?” she asks, and spares the young man a sidewise glance. “You are really
not
going to tell me how it all ends, are you?”

“I fear that rushing it would spoil the tale,” the young man says, “and all I have left to me are these stories. Surely, you understand.”

“Fine. If that’s the way you want to play, Scheherazade, and if we’re
both
lucky enough to live through another goddamn day.”

“Just keep your head down,” he whispers, trying not to think about the stables below the terrible old house, or whatever it is the changeling woman will do before dawn. “And I’ll do the same, to the best of my abilities.”

And five minutes later, when she’s gone out into the snowy, windy night, he lies alone on the bed with his bottle of ginger-flavored brandy and tries to get a few minutes sleep, there in the relative warmth and comfort of the shabby roam, before they come to take him downstairs again.

Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things
...

Edgar Allan Poe

Brylee did object to the casket, and also to the hole in the frozen earth. She did object, in a hesitant, deferential sort of way. But, as they say, her protestations fell upon deaf ears, even though Miss Josephine fully acknowledged that none of it was necessary. “It will do you good,” the vampire said, and, too, she said, “One day you’ll understand, when you are older.” And, she added, “There is far too little respect for tradition these days.” Brylee came near to begging, at the end, but she’s not a stupid girl, and she knew that, likely as not, begging would only annoy the vampire and make the whole affair that much more unpleasant. Being buried when one is fully conscious and keenly aware of the confines of her narrow house and the stink of cemetery soil, these things are terrible, but, as she has learned, there is always something incalculably worse than the very worst thing that she can imagine. Miss Josephine has had centuries to perfect the stepwise procession from Paradise to Purgatory to the lowest levels of an infinitely descending Hell, and she wears her acumen and expertise where it may be seen by all, and especially where it may be seen by her lovers (whether they are living, dead, or somewhere in between). So, yes, Brylee objected, but only the halfhearted, token objection permitted by her station. And then she did as she was bidden. She dressed in the funerary gown from one of her mistress’ steamer trunks, the dress, all indecent, immaculate white lace and silk taffeta; it smells of cedar and moth balls. Amid the palest chrysanthemums and lilies, babies breath and albino roses, she lay down in the black-lacquered casket, which is hardly more than a simple pine box, and she did not move. She did not make a sound. Not breathing was, of course, the simplest part. Miss Josephine laid a heavy gold coin on each of her eyelids before the mourners began to arrive, that she would have something to give the ferryman. “She was so young,” one of the vampires said, the one named Addie Goodwin. “Your sorrow must be inconsolable,” said another, the man whom they all call simply Signior Garzarek, who came all the way from New York for the mock-somber ceremony in the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street. “It was an easy death,” Miss Josephine told him, struggling to hold back tears her atrophied ducts could never actually manufacture. “She went in her sleep, the poor dear.” And there was the sound of weeping, so Brylee knew that not
all
the mourners gathered by Miss Josephine were dead. An antique gramophone played “Be Thou My Vision” again and again and again, and there was a eulogy, delivered by an unfamiliar, stuttering voice. And then, before the lid was finally placed on the black casket and nailed firmly down, Miss Josephine laid a single
red
rose across Brylee’s folded hands. The vampire leaned close, and she whispered, “You are exquisite, my dear. You are superb. Sleep tight.” When the casket was lifted off its marble pedestal by the pallbearers, Brylee fought back a sudden wave of panic that threatened to get the better of her. She came very near to screaming, and that would have ruined everything. That would have undone all her mistress’ painstaking theater and pretense, and only the knowledge that there is always something worse kept her silent as she was carried out to the waiting hearse.
No harm can come to me
, she reminded herself again and again and again.
I am dead, and what harm can possibly come from these silly games. I am dead almost a month now, and the grave can surely hold no horror for me anymore.
“One night and one day,” her mistress had promised, “and not an hour longer. You can do that, sweetheart. The time will fly by, you’ll see.” Brylee had not been told to which cemetery she would be delivered, so it might be the Old North Burial Ground in Providence, or some place as far away as Westerly, or even Stonington Cemetery in Connecticut. The hearse ride was longer than she expected, but maybe it circled blocks and doubled back, so maybe it didn’t go very far at all from the yellow house on Benefit Street. She lay still with the gold coins on her eyes and the rose gripped now in her hands, and the words to “Be Thou My Vision” repeating again and again behind her eyelids, which Miss Josephine had sewn shut for the occasion, just in case.
Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight; Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight; Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower: Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.
Neither death nor undeath had done very much to shatter Brylee’s atheistic convictions, so these words held within them no possible comfort. They seemed, at best, a cruel, mocking chorus, childish taunts she would carry with her down into the cold dirt.
Riches I heed not, nor Man’s empty praise, Thou mine Inheritance, now and always: Thou and Thou only, first in my heart, High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.
“You are fortunate,” Miss Josephine told her when Brylee made the aforementioned objections. “When it was my time to go into the ground, I was wrapped in only a cotton winding cloth, with a little myrrh and frankincense, then buried beneath a dozen feet of Egyptian sand. I was forbidden to rise for a full month, and could always hear the jackals and vultures dose at hand, pawing and pecking for a scrap of carrion. There was a sandstorm, and a dozen feet became almost a hundred overnight. And when my time below had passed, no one came for me. I was left to dig myself free.” Which is to say, again, that the most appalling situation can always become so much more appalling, and the lesson has not been lost on Brylee. She suffered the ride to the unknown cemetery in perfect silence. She made no utterance as the pine casket was lowered into the waiting grave, nor when the raw wound in the January landscape was filled in again by men with shovels and the more efficient bucket of a noisy, chugging skid loader. She was silent as silent ever dared to be, while the earth rained loudly down upon the lid of her casket. But she did flinch, and her sharp teeth pierced her lower lip, half expecting the lid to collapse at any moment, splintered by the weight of all that dirt (though she knew well enough there are steel reinforcements to prevent such a mishap). In the darkness, she grew almost as taut as any genuine corpse bound by the shackles of
rigor mortis
, and she tasted her own blood. Or, rather, the stolen blood that she pretended was her own. In the hour of twilight, before the funeral service, when she was still half awake at best, Miss Josephine had brought a gift to her. “Because it is such a special day,” the vampire said, then gently laid the banquet on the bed next to Brylee. The girl’s hair was almost the same color as the black-lacquered casket, and Miss Josephine had only taken the smallest sip from her, just enough that she wouldn’t struggle and ruin Brylee’s last meal before the grave. “It’s very kind of you,” she told her mistress and pantomimed a grateful smile, though, in truth she was much too nervous to be very hungry; she would not be so impolite as to
say
so. “Do you know her name,” Brylee asked. Miss Josephine made a sour sort of face, and asked her what possible difference a name would make, one way or the other. Brylee did not ask the question a second time. Instead, her tongue flicked across the wound that had already been made in the girl’s throat. Brylee’s incisors and eye teeth made a wider insult of Miss Josephine’s kiss, parting skin and fascia, the protective sheets of platysma and sternocleidomastoid muscle, to reveal the pulsing ecstasy of the carotid artery. She’d paid close attention to the anatomy lessons that she’d been sent down to the Hounds to learn, and she knew well enough to avoid the less-healthful, deoxygenated blood of the jugular. And for a short time, to Brylee’s surprise, the joy of the nameless girl’s fading life rushing into her was enough to take her mind off everything that was to come. When she was finished, when the heart had ceased pumping and little remained but a pale husk, Miss Josephine made her sit up, and she cleaned Brylee’s blood-smeared face with a black silk handkerchief imported from France more than a hundred years before. Then her mistress kissed her, licking the last few stains from her face, and they lay together for a time, with the dead girl’s body growing cold between them. Miss Josephine’s delicate hands wandered lazily across Brylee’s body, the vampire’s fingernails dancing like animated shards of glass; she spoke of other funerals, other burials, and she spoke of resurrection, too. “There is not a surrender to the clay,” she said, “without a concomitant rebirth. We do not lie down, but that we rise when our sleep is done.” And these were pretty words, to be sure, as were the prayers she muttered to forgotten deities while her sharp fingers strayed and wandered and found their way inside Brylee. But when the last clod of frozen soil has been shoved rudely back into place, and she can no longer discern the noise of either men or their machines, when all that has
passed
in the preceeding few hours dissolves into a seemingly timeless
present
, the beauty of words is overthrown. Here there is a growing silence, and an absence of light that she knows would not be the least bit lessened if stitches did not prevent the opening of her eyelids. This is the truth lurking in back of all the ceremony. This is the simple and inviolable negation of the tomb. Brylee laughs very softly, for no ears but her own, and then she whispers, more quietly still, “Out—out are the lights—out all! And over each quivering form, the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm...” But she trails off, leaving the stanza unfinished. It would be a grand joke, if uttered by Miss Josephine, or Signior Garzarek, bat from Brylee’s lips, in this box and in this hole, the words tumble senselessly back upon themselves. She stops before they choke her. They lie like ashes and mold upon her tongue. And so she is quiet, and very, very still, because she has been assured it will be only one night and one day before the hour of her exhumation. She can do that much, surely, and when it is over and she’s once again safe in the arms of her mistress, even the suggestion that her current situation held some minor species of dread will seem patently absurd. There is nothing here to fear, and even the bitter cold is not a hardship to one such as herself. She is safe inside her shell, and has but to wait, and waiting is the only genuine trial here to be endured. She thinks to speed the end of her interment by busying her mind, because, as Miss Josephine has said, it is
only
an undisciplined mind that can pose any possible threat while she is below. Brylee licks her dry lips, and she begins counting backwards from one-hundred thousand, for she can not conceive any more mundane task. With luck, she will bore herself to sleep, and not wake until the men return with their shovels. She says the numbers aloud, laying each one with the same meticulous care a brick mason might go about his work. And in this manner, time passes, even if she is not precisely aware of its passage. She stops thinking about the underside of the casket’s lid, mere inches from her face, and all the weight bearing down upon the wood. She does not dwell on how little unfilled space there is to her left or her right. It hardly matters that she is unable to sit up, or roll over on her side, or bend her knees, and she does not succumb to morbid, irrational fears of suffocation. Dead lungs have no need of air. She counts, and counts, and, soon enough, her voice becomes a calming metronome. “And when you return,” Miss Josephine said the night before, “when you are given back to me, delivered from that underworld like Proserpine or, more appropriately, like cruel and wanton Ishtar—when we are so soon reunited, you will never again be called upon to prove yourself. There will only be the long red sea of eternity.” And recalling these words, Brylee loses count somewhere after forty-five thousand, and,full in the knowledge of her own recklessness, she listens. Her lips are stilled, and there is no longer the distraction of her voice. There is the sound of the wild January wind, but muffled by her tomb into the most indistinct threnody. Here would be the living hammer of her heartbeat, if her heart still beat. If she still lived. Here would be her hitching breath, perhaps. But her body has been rendered all but inert by the ministrations of her ravenous lover. So, the silence is profound, and for some period of time that passes without being measured, Brylee lies listening to
almost
nothing at all. In this slumberous white month, even the worms and beetles do not stir, and the moles and voles and millipedes are as monstrously serene as the surface of the moon. With no forethought, no intention to do anything of the sort, Brylee raises her right hand, the pads of her fingers brushing the lid above her, wood sanded almost completely smooth. Having found that barrier, touching it, she immediately withdraws her hand. And then, as she begins to feel the dry folds of that alarm she promised her mistress
and
promised herself would not overtake her, she here’s a
new
sound. Very far away, at first, or so it seems, and she is reminded of a discarded life, standing on a subway platform station as a train rumbled towards the terminal. Though, whatever thing is the author of
this
approaching tumult would put any subway train to shame. Over minutes or hours, the distant rumble becomes a not-so-distant boom, as of summer thunder, and, at last, a roar. And it cannot be so very far below her, this passing demon, which seems to roll on forever, dragging itself through an unsuspected burrow gnawed in the rotten bedrock below the cemetery. But even now, Brylee does not scream. If she screams, it might hear, and she imagines it moving restlessly, never-sleeping, a labyrinthine circuit running from one graveyard to the next, listening for anything that is, by some accident, not yet dead. In times past, it must have been more often sated than in this faultless age of embalming. She squeezes her eyes shut as tightly as she may (though the stitches forbid any chance of them opening), and remembers something Miss Josephine said when they lay together in bed with the devoured girl’s cadaver in between. Brylee was lost in the bliss that follows feeding, and the bliss of her mistresses hands upon her, upon her and within her. “Perhaps, down there, you will even be so fortunate as to hear his coming and going about his incessant, immemorial rounds,” and in the haze of pleasure she’d not thought to ask the identity of this possible august visitor, a name nor any other manner of appellation. Around her pine box, the world shudders, and all the prayers she offers up in the all but-end less pandemonium are shameless, bald-faced lies. But, it passes her by, this innominate leviathan, and either she was unnoticed or nothing it desired. Or, possibly, Brylee was only meant to bear blind witness to its coming and going. No offering trussed up pretty and left helpless within an inverted altar. Some time that she can only mark as later, the ground around and below her is silent and still again, and whatever came so awfully near would seem only a dream, if she did not, by heretofore unsuspected instincts, know otherwise. Brylee lies in the black-lacquered casket, and she is silent, and she is still, and she waits, permitting no thoughts now but her mistress’ beloved face and recollections of wide and star-dappled skies stretched out forever above them.