Exquisite Corpse (30 page)

There were a million possible obstacles. Luke had to forget them all. He tried the gate to make sure his luck hadn't suddenly changed. It hadn't. He took off his leather jacket and swung it over his head, trying to snag its lining on the iron spikes.

He had to repeat this several times, stopping twice when cars passed. Finally the jacket snagged on the gate and held. Luke tugged it, yanked it hard, let his knees sag until all his weight hung from it. The jacket was caught tight.

He pulled himself up as quickly as he could, grabbing on to the ironwork, easing himself over the top of the gate, using the heavy leather to protect his hands and his crotch from the spikes. When he was over, he clung to the inside of the gate with one hand and carefully freed his jacket with the other. Then he let himself drop into the alley and waited to feel ravening canine jaws sink into his ass.

Nothing. No dog, no alarm that he could hear. He crept along the alley, stopped when he reached the cobblestone courtyard. It was softly shadowed by lights at the base of a gurgling fountain, but otherwise dark. There were no other buildings on the lot.

Luke approached the rear wall. Perhaps ten feet high, of slippery concrete topped with more spikes and razor wire, it would be harder to scale than the gate had been. Yet scale it he must, with no time to waste. He closed his eyes and said a prayer to whatever might be listening, and he
ran
at the wall, hurled himself at it, flung the jacket as high as he could.

For a sickening moment he felt himself falling backward, and fully expected to snap his spine on the damp cobble-stones. Then the jacket snagged again. He almost lost his grip on the sleeve. Retaining it through sheer force of will, he hauled himself up and onto the top of the wall.

For several moments he lay there, panting with the exertion, swooning in and out of consciousness. The night swam with psychedelic designs. He wondered if his heart might just
give out right now. No, he was damned if it would. He forced himself to move his head and look around. There was a slanting rooftop just a few feet below him, some kind of shed or slave quarters. In the distance, through foliage and shadow, he could barely discern the spectral shape of Jay's house.

The spikes were beginning to gouge through his jacket. Soon they would draw blood. With one last convulsive heave Luke pulled himself over the wall, yanked his jacket off the spikes, and dropped onto the rooftop. He lay with his cheek pressed to the cold slates, resting.

Then, very faintly, he heard a sound from inside the building. A low, bubbling, hopeless scream. Like someone trying to gargle boiling water.

He recognized the voice.

Luke scrambled to the edge of the roof and dropped the last eight feet into the courtyard. Moldy statuary seemed to spring at him as the yard flooded with light.
Motion sensor. Fuck!

The sound came again, even fainter. Luke wrapped his jacket around his head and shoulders and hurled himself at one of the black-painted windows. He felt glass and ancient wood splintering; then he was kicking the frame away, clawing his way in, throwing the jacket aside and staring at the impossible scene that confronted him.

Jay Byrne and a dark-haired stranger, their pale naked bodies smeared with more blood than Luke could imagine coming out of someone as small as Tran. Yet there was Tran on a wheeled metal table, his body split open by an enormous deliquescent wound, his head thrown back in saintlike agony, his bound limbs convulsing as his back arched in the spasms of death. The tabletop and floor beneath him were awash with blood.

Jay raised his head as Luke came crashing through the window. Long strings of glistening red flesh dangled from his open mouth and dripped from his chin. The stranger was
chewing something too. Luke saw all this in the split-second it took him to regain his footing and slide his fingers into the top of his right boot. His momentum carried him toward Jay. He was already flicking open the silver V of the straight razor.

The stranger moved toward him. Jay moved away, behind the table. Luke clamped the open razor between his teeth, hooked the fingers of both hands under the table's edge, and heaved with all his strength. The rubber wheels skidded sideways. Already top-heavy with Tran's weight, the table began to tip. Jay tried to scramble out of the way, but the heavy slab of metal and the body strapped to it came smashing down on his ankle, pinning him.

Luke flung himself across the table. The razor was in his hand again. He was on top of Jay like a lover. Jay clawed at his eyes. Luke twisted his head, caught Jay's fingers in his teeth, and bit down hard. Jay yanked his hand away, but not before Luke had tasted Tran's blood on those bony fingers.

With his left forearm he forced Jay's head back. Jay choked, spat out gobbets of half-chewed flesh. One landed on Luke's upper lip, and he licked it away without thinking. Jay grinned up at him, eyes corrosive with madness. There was a hideous familiarity in that grin. “I don't know you,” Luke sobbed as he jammed the blade behind Jay's left ear and dragged it along the path of Jay's jugular.

A thin red line appeared in its wake. I
didn't cut him deep enough,
Luke thought dumbly,
I fucked up, and any second now his friend's going to bury an axe in my head.
Then the line widened into a lipless crimson chasm, and a hot geyser of blood bathed Luke's face, stinging his eyes and blinding him.

A
nd so, at what was to have been the moment of our greatest communion, Jay and I were separated forever. There was no chance for anything as formal as good-bye; I barely reached his side in time to see the last of the life pump out of him. His body gave a great shudder and his eyes began to cloud. I was left clutching at that most poignant and useless of regrets: if my lover had to die, why couldn't I have been the one to kill him?

Luke had rolled out of the way as Jay's blood sprayed his face. (I didn't know he was called Luke then, of course, and didn't find out until later.) For a long time I could not take my eyes off Jay. I was afraid of missing anything, any subliminal message his eyes and nerves and skin might convey to me as he descended. Luke could easily have crept up and finished me off with his razor, for I scarcely remembered that anyone else was alive in the room.

Jay had no message for me, only a mad grin frozen on his face, only an exquisite marble pallor caused by the rapid draining of blood. I cradled him, held him to me. His head sagged backward; the jellied edges of the great raw wound in his throat ripped; the ends of his hair trailed in a pool of his own gore. There seemed to be nothing more I could do for him, nothing more I could learn from him.

Gradually I became aware of the other party in the room: his sweaty living scent, the deep and constant anger that ran through him like an electrical current. I turned to face him. He was crouched against the wall, arms wrapped around his knees, hollow eyes fixed on me.

“You're Andrew Compton,” he said.

I had expected anything but that. “How do you know?”

“Because I saw your picture in the paper, asshole. I can't believe the
Weekly World News
got something right.”

I considered this. Doubtless my picture had appeared in a great many papers; yet no one had shown me the slightest sign of recognition since I left the hospital morgue. You may recall my assertion that murderers are blessed with malleable faces. Yet there is always that person in a million who will know me not for the distinction of my features, but by the predatory kinship in my eyes. I never doubted that Jay had seen it the night we met at the Hand of Glory, although he had not comprehended its meaning at first. Now this interloper could see it too.

I wondered whether I could bring myself to kill him.

“So kill me, Andrew. I recognize you. I can turn you in. Kill me.”

I realized I need not kill him. This man would never go to the police. He wished to die a quick and violent death, not to be held in some cell, embroiled in sordid murder, forced to cling to his own miserable thread of a life. And he
was
dying; I could see it in his sallow face, his sunken embers of eyes. But slowly, fibre by fibre, going ungently into a night that did not look good to him at all.

Reminding myself that the separation was only temporary, I extracted myself from Jay's congealing repose. I stood over Luke and smiled down at him. Though I was naked and he was
clothed, though he still held a weapon and I had only my flesh, I felt his world's foundations tremble as he realized that he was in the presence of a creature worse than himself.

I paced before him, still smiling. I picked up the fillet blade we had used to open Tran, whetted the blade with my thumb and thrust the resultant gash under his nose. When he failed to flinch away, I knew what he was dying of.

“Are you afraid to die?” I asked him.

“Aren't you?”

“Of course. I've done it, and it's terrifying.”

He stared up at me, eyes full of blood and hatred.

“And yet”—I showed my teeth in what I hoped was an ingratiating manner—“it can also be addictive.”

His dry whisper saddened me with its pointlessness: “Fuck you.” He might be a fellow predator, this one, but unlike Jay he was a puerile one. He did not wish to learn anything from me, and I suspected he had little left to teach me.

I offered him the knife. I directed his attention to the wide range of implements upon the walls. I invited him to simply crawl into the freezer and pull the lid down on himself; I promised him I would not open it again. At this comforting suggestion he only shuddered and buried his face in his hands. I tired of taunting him and left him to his grief.

Jay's skin was sticky with drying blood. I curled around him again, licked his shoulder, traced the curve of his throat to the edge of the mortal wound. When my tongue slid into it, the taste was like nothing else had ever been. At the same time it was like coming home.

I decided Luke could go hang; for all I knew he would do just that, though I rather hoped not, for I enjoyed the thought of his continued suffering. I gathered Jay into my arms and lifted him. He seemed very light, as if something more substantial than spirit had left him. I carried him through the floodlit garden and over the threshold into the house.

I bathed him in the tub, washed the blood from his stiffening
hair and his white, white skin, dried him, and laid him gently on the bed. And I had my time with him, this new Jay who did not and could not resist me, who never protested when I tore new holes in him, who minded not at all when I swallowed one of his testes like a salty raw oyster. It was sweet still, better than it had ever been with any of my boys. But it was almost beside the point.

I took a wide strip of meat from his right flank, carefully peeling the skin away. I felt a pang at cutting him so deeply now that I was not making love to him, but the cutting of this strip of meat was essential to both of us.

I fried it lightly in butter, tucked it between two slices of fresh bakery bread, and wrapped it in cellophane for the trip.

Before I left the house, I had a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. My body felt strong and lean; my colour was better than it had been since I left Painswick. I felt different now I'd been recognized, as if there was something I should do. But I could think of nothing else to do here.

When I carried Jay back out to the slave quarters, Luke was gone. I laid Jay down beside Tran, arranged his arms around the boy's torn and stinking body. Then I sat beside them for a long time, unable to take my leave. At last my legs began to cramp, and I pulled myself up and returned to the house.

I dressed in a loose sweater of Jay's and the trousers I had bought in Soho on Guy Fawkes' Day. Out the front, I hailed a cab and crept away down Royal Street behind a mule-drawn carriage, anonymous as any tourist, back the way I had come.

Upon my Greyhound-borne arrival, I had noted that the bus terminal doubled as the train depot. Here you could purchase tickets on trains whose names were magical mystery tours unto themselves: Southern Crescent, Sunset Limited, City of New Orleans. Paying with Jay's cash, I reserved a private compartment on a train that shot straight out into the American desert, a land I imagined as arid and relentless as my own heart.

I had hours to wait. I spent them watching the door, secure in my anonymity, not in the least intimidated by the occasional policemen passing through. At last my train arrived, a long string of silver bullets with their functions painted on the sides:
DINING CAR, OBSERVATION, SLEEPER
. I was a
SLEEPER
. My compartment was miniscule and orderly, exactly the sort of shell I craved.

As the train pulled out of the station, I stripped naked, folded down my bed, and crawled between clean rough sheets. There I unwrapped and ate my sandwich. The meat was quite tough, with a flavour balanced somewhere between sweet and tangy, itself made up of all Jay's boys.

Adrift in the dark rocking silence, I listened to the workings of my body. My lungs pulled in air and pushed out poison; my stomach and intestines milled Jay down to his essence; my heart marked time. For thirty-three years I had lived in this prison alone.

Once again, I slowed my pulse, my breathing, my involuntary functions to nearly nothing. I had not known if I could do it a second time. As I slipped under, I felt a vast relief. The desert was days away. This time I did not need or want to pass for dead. I wanted only to keep Jay's meat in me as long as I could, to process and assimilate as much of him as possible. When I awoke, he would be with me always, and all the world's pleasures would be ours to revel in.

This time I was not corpse, but larva.

L
ate in the year, New Orleans still has its hot days. In the slave quarters, Jay and Tran blossomed like the giant stinking carrion-flowers that grow in humid jungles. Their ravaged abdomens swelled and burst like red-black petals, a jubilee of rot. Their putrescent fluids pooled on the concrete floor and in the hollows of their disintegrating bodies.