A Drop of Scarlet Read online

  Snap to attention, utter clarity.

  A plump girl in a lavender tank top with a backpack walked out of the bus terminal, heading away from the brighter and denser lights and the heavy smell of humans, turning a few times, pausing, bemused by the yellow-gold street lamps, obviously not familiar with the layout of the city, sandals clapping against her bare soles.

  Lost and vulnerable. The tiger struggled, preparing to tear its way free.

  I could always just leave. Go home. Work on my lesson plans. But the mesons and fermions slipped through my fingers and left me with a head full of static. Chaos. Someone else would have to drive.

  Lavender girl stumbled into the paws of the tiger in the darkness under the curving bridge on-ramp and gave a quick “Oh!”

  “Are you trying to get downtown?”

  It sounded like my voice, but I hadn’t said anything, and I couldn’t decide which class to concentrate on, couldn’t remember what we’d done last week, or even where we were in the semester, and I couldn’t get home. And the tiger was out, so I had to step aside, quickly.

  Someone else should drive.

  There was still darkness—darkness and crying and the hot reek of spilt blood—but I was elsewhere.

  In the garden, the long narrow strip of the back garden of the house in Boldon Colliery, the soot-coated bricks and the stunted weeds breaking through cracks in the pavement. Cold—no time to grab a coat or hat or anything—secret mission, outside without permission, Mum gone to the chemist’s to get more of those horrid pills for me to choke down. My throat would just close up on the dry lozenges and I couldn’t swallow, and by now, six months later, Mum got cross when I coughed and gagged. I didn’t ask to be ill, I shouted at her, and she gave me a smack and went out. I hadn’t been in the garden for a long lifetime of sweaty sheets, and went out with my head uncovered, my heart pounding with excitement. I had to make it quick; the chemist’s was only a short distance away by bicycle.

  But then—my hands cold and sticky, the stench of blood and fresh shit, my rabbit’s dashed brains leaking all over my trembling, skeletal hands.

  No, wait. Lavender darkening to deep violet. That wasn’t all of it.

  I hadn’t seen my bunny since my uncle Iaun bought her for me, and they brought her to my bed, and I lay, roasting with fever, and stroked the lush black-white-black fur, the softest and most lovely thing I’d ever touched, and she sniffed me and wasn’t afraid and I couldn’t keep myself from weeping. I blinked out, and when I woke up, they told me they’d put her in a lovely hutch down in the garden, and I must get better soon, so I could see her again. But I didn’t get better for the longest time, and Mum didn’t care for animals, and Dad absolutely could not be arsed to feed and muck out a rabbit, no matter how lush its fur.

  Rhombus the rabbit had grown up while I’d lain groaning in bed, and she was no longer a tiny, fluffy Easter bunny, but now a ten-pound, mottled, rheumyeyed October monster with nuggets of dung clinging to her fur. I determined not to be frightened by my precious bun, my little darling, no matter what she looked like now. I opened the wire cage and tried to feed her a thick blade of grass. She lashed out with her streaky brown incisors and bit the nail on my forefinger clean off and blood went everywhere. And without even thinking, almost without feeling the sword of rage that cut through my senses, I shouted and grabbed the rabbit by the ears and swung her against the bricks.

  And she didn’t die at first—oh, no sir.

  First, she screamed.

  under the bridge you’re under the bridge look at that mess lap up the blood drink it drink it drink it

  And I panicked because Mum was coming, I heard the gears of her rusty bicycle, she had to have heard the scream like a siren, eyes flashing red and blue, and I hit the rabbit’s head against the pavement, twice, three times, the skull crushing like a smashed orange—

  “John! What have you done?”

  In my wife’s house, sitting on her kitchen floor. The realization was as abrupt as a bucket of cold water thrown on my naked back. My wife’s hand hovered above my temple, and blood dotted her fingertips. She had gotten the blood off my face when she touched me. My wife had seen this, the lavender girl, the bloody tiger paws, without having been there. If she was my wife she could not have seen; my wife was a human, and this . . . something else. But, oh, she looked like her, and I wanted her. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to kiss and squeeze. I wanted her to hold me. I wanted the human woman to hold the human man, and it was impossible; only the monsters existed now, only the tiger and the stag and the deep bone chill of the spectrum of darkness.

  But my dick was hard, nonetheless.

  I needed to be somewhere else.

  “Did the cops follow you here?” she asked in a whisper.

  “I killed Rhombus, Mum,” I said, completing the thought. I was so cold, although I was wearing a coat now, and I clutched it around me with a shudder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. She bit me.”

  Ariane glanced at the black square of the kitchen window. What a beautiful curvature of her neck. The second-softest thing I ever touched. No, that was the inside of her thighs, followed by the backs of her arms, and then, that tendon in her neck that only emerged when her head was turned, perfect for sliding my lips across. She was listening to the street, listening for the soft pick-up of the engines of police cruisers, muffled but distinctive, like a silencer on a gun; she heard those sounds coming from a dozen blocks away or more, and she guessed by their electrochemical properties that several of them were probably taxicabs. I was glad that she could sense that, because I couldn’t at the moment; the screaming of the rabbit blotted out everything that I might hear from my environment, and despite everything that I did to try to blot it out, it grew louder and louder. I could see Ariane’s thoughts inside my thoughts, very clear and in three dimensions, but off to one side, like a holographic inset on a video screen, one among thousands of others.

  “Yes, you did kill her,” she said aloud to me. I took a deep breath and held it, and the screaming began to slowly withdraw. “She hurt you. Rhombus hurt you. Did the girl hurt you?”

  “There’s no girl,” I said. My voice was deep, and I had the same cold-water shock of understanding that I was an adult, that I was thirty, that I was—

  killed killed dead but alive a nightmare a monster

  Time to step aside. Reasonable; adult male having slightly confusing conversation with adult female. Nothing funny going on here. “I’m not sure what you mean. There’s no girl.”

  “Well, there’s not anymore.” Ariane gave a little humorless laugh. Ah yes, I understood; dry Ariane, droll Ariane, Ariane with the superpower of harsh tactlessness. My own superpower was the Singularity Sarcasm; I could make anybody’s ego collapse into nothingness. What a great pair of berks we were. Perfect for each other; a couple of ruthless bitches with tongues like scythes. She was talking, didn’t care about anything I’d said, that I’d felt, that she’d seen by stealing it from my mind. “You obviously killed her. But were you seen by any cops? Did the police follow you here?”

  Fuck it. I didn’t ask to be ill. “It’s all over my hands,” I said, holding them up. But all the blood, all the slimy wads of brain matter and fragments of bone, seemed to be gone. Even the blood that had been crammed under my fingernails was gone, absorbed, soaked into my skin like some immensely cruel lotion. “I didn’t mean to. She bit off my fingernail.”

  “Your fingernail is still attached, John, see? It grew back.” Ariane grasped my left hand and held it in front of my eyes. I needed to be somewhere else immediately, but I couldn’t leave; her touch kept me rooted to the spot, slumped on the linoleum floor, quivering in a hundred watts of electric light. “That was a long time ago. You were just a little kid. You’re all grown-up now.”

  Still not listening to me, damn her. Sometimes I hated her chamois-silky Southern accent, hated her turn of phrase. I looked at her, trying to determine if further communication was even desirable, let alone possib
le, then squeezed my eyes shut against the infernal electric light. There was no way I could make her understand as long as the lights were threatening me. Too much electric light meant the stag, and I had been trying all night, as hard as I could, not to think about the stag and what it could do. The stag controlled the bridge, not the troll. That bridge was forbidden. The stag could read minds; the wrong thoughts would evoke the cataclysm. Then, of course, the tiger came. I couldn’t get away; they had me trapped, Scylla and Charybdis, position and momentum, never knowing, never driving.

  Darker and darkest.

  I felt myself physically shaken. “John? You have to be here with me now. Do you understand?”

  I couldn’t speak. I had been muzzled, paralyzed, my mouth useless. I couldn’t reach Ariane. I tried to reach out with my hand across an infinite gulf. I could touch Mars; surely I could touch her, hold her, beg her to hold me?

  My darling, are you gone forever?

  She grabbed my wrists so tightly that my fingers went numb. No communication was possible, and she was hurting me, and she was a monster of the darkness, all tiger, all savagery, all the time, a driver, a commander of metal animals, a butcher of flesh. Yes, gone forever, my girl. Both of us, dead.

  I struggled, rolled over her, trying to pin her writhing to the floor, mutely begging her to let me escape. She was easily as strong as I was, maybe even more so. Her inertia carried us over again, her on top of me, and my fingers began to throb. I tried to bite her, but she distracted me with a swift blow of her knee against the space above my own. Oddly enough, the pain cleared my mind, purifying it, bringing me inexorably back into myself. What the hell was I doing, wrestling with my wife on the kitchen floor, with all our clothes on? And where were my eyeglasses? “Ow!” I said. Sounded so normal, so human.

  “Dammit, John!” Ariane shouted. “I’m trying to help you! Quit fighting me!” She let me go and sprang to her feet, her eyes wild and desperate. I had to laugh. “John? Are you listening to me? Are we in danger? That’s all I need to know.”

  “I killed her,” I admitted. I slowly rose to my feet, the vague pain in my knee vanishing as soon as I stood. The darkness outside looked good, clear and perfectly detailed. I wanted to throw off these stiffening clothes and go for a swim in the river. “I killed Rhombus. Sorry. I needed to kill her. The tiger was hungry. You have a tiger, don’t you? Or are you tiger all the time?”

  I focused on her as much as I could. Ariane was thinking of a bottle of blood, hungering for it, but not in a true way; she just wanted it. It was in her car. I laughed again, even though there were tears on my face, knowing that she would have to go and fetch it, the same way I had to stand aside when my tiger wanted out. Ariane was not a killer, but there was something inside her that my tiger recognized as being similar to himself. “Stay here,” she said to me. “I can help you. Stay here.”

  “You can’t help me,” I replied. I was suddenly exhausted. I didn’t like the direction her thoughts were going, and I didn’t like how I could see them, no longer looking in through the window, but being there inside, with no outside of my own. I needed the river, I needed the woods, I needed to be out of this house, my wife’s house but not my own, a house for my wife and another man, and their sexual lusts and their tigers thirsting for blood. Why blood? Why consume blood? What kind of creature drank blood?

  “I can help you,” Ariane insisted. “I’m just gonna go out to the car and—”

  Not. Listening. Not my wife at all; that skinny monster’s monster bride, and me a victim in the middle. Fuck it. I didn’t ask to be ill. “Ha ha ha,” I responded, raising my head, a ghastly smile stretching my mouth. I stared her full in the face; she was a stranger, with pale skin so unlike the honey cheeks and cinnamon freckles of my Ariane, the stranger’s hair in such perfect curls, not the anarchy of my Ariane’s obnoxious frizzy mane. This was not my wife. My wife was human. Was. Gone forever, my darling. “You won’t help. You can’t help. Who the fuck are you, anyway?” I couldn’t smile anymore, not even a death’s head skull grin. “What are you doing here?”

  She paused at the open door, her eyes riveted to mine. “I live here,” she said, struggling to keep her voice mild and neutral. I had to laugh again. She would lose! “So do you. You live with me. This is your house.” She swallowed, and whispered, “I’m your wife.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, staring over her shoulder at the deep night outside, straining my ears for the faint sounds of electric lights, frogs, traffic on Burnside, anything different from the sounds of screaming, of begging, of gagging. “And you know that as well as I do.” I shoved past her through the door, out onto the side porch, my face turned into the rising wind.

  I heard her voice catch in a gasp as I dashed into the road, skidding to a stop in the brilliant glare of the lights of an oncoming car. For a moment, I turned back to the house, catching a glimpse of her clutching the doorjamb with her long, sharp fingernails, and as the car’s brakes screeched, the car’s driver swore, and Ariane gasped, I made a silent leap into the trees, heading towards the cement and scaffolding and the cold snake of the river.

  Moments later, I broke the river’s surface and took a deep breath of evening sky. Winter was on its way; I could taste it. The water was so cold it was syrupy, and so filthy my hair felt oily and soapy at once. I swam to the east bank, shambling along the road in my heavy, soaked clothes and bare feet, and did not rest until I was secure in the cellar of a house with three newspapers in the front yard and plenty of fallen leaves on the sidewalk. Outside the cars swished by, creating a sound like waves breaking on a nearby shore. The sun was coming, the biggest electric light of them all, so powerful and vicious that it even made the stag stand down.

  In the back of my mind I could feel Ariane crying for me, but the brightness of dawn grew to a dazzling intensity, and I crept as far back into the packed dirt and shadows as I could get.

  The tiger was quiet, but not silent. It could wait me out. It was always stronger than I was; I was its plaything, just a vessel for it to ride around in, something to make its desires manifest, someone to torture.

  I didn’t ask for this.

  II

  ABSTRACTS

  ORFEO RICARI

  I dreamt of Ariane often. My child, my creature, confused, alone, frustrated, suffering and crying, lost in the pain of her own creation.

  It made sense to me; I had wept my share of tears. Indeed, it was a terrible existence at times. It had never really been otherwise, nor would it ever be. Nothing that I thought, said, or did would change that.

  The scent of Roman soil assailed my nostrils immediately upon waking, obliterating the sensations from the dream I had just had, where the world’s scent was fresher, greener, and altogether American. I was so many thousands of miles away from her, but in my sleep she seemed so close I could reach out and touch her.

  In Rome, I had taken lodging near a university campus. Such institutions were a sensible place to settle for a creature such as myself. With many students having reckless first experiences with alcohol, drugs, sex, and motor vehicles, accidents and fatalities were not uncommon. My activities, kept discreet, would not ever be noticed.

  I did not have to go more than a street or two past my hotel before my goal was met. I gently grasped the arm of the first student I saw and drew him back into the shadows, cloaking his thoughts as we moved. The young man in short sleeves made no effort to stop me as I drank from his arm, swallowing slowly to minimize his discomfort, the sleek limb warm and tanned and muscled, his armpit smelling of deodorant chemicals. That scent, more than anything else about him, informed me that he was an American. A lot of the students on this campus were American. I had a weakness for the young American students: their accents, priorities, and strange attitudes.

  When I had satisfied my urge, I indulged myself by looking over the young man I’d chosen. He was very calm, even wearing a hint of a smile, as if he were assaulted by a vampire every other day and didn’t much m
ind it. I hadn’t taken much, just a mouthful or three, just enough to keep the urge at bay for several more nights. His blood was as clean and healthy as a woodland stream in a forgotten forest—no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, almost no meat. Most extraordinary, a college student with no chemical vices. “Are you all right?” I asked him, even though I knew that he was. In fact, I knew most everything about him.

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing the spot on his arm with his thumb.

  “There won’t be a mark,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “May I go into the library with you?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, checking his watch. “It’s open late tonight. Till ten.”

  “Splendid,” I said, and nudged myself out of his memories while I followed, as subtle as a breeze, behind him through the doors of the university library.

  As I walked silently along the shelves, I mulled over details from my dream. I had more difficulty focusing my thoughts than usual. I was distracted by the atmosphere of concentrated, silent, urgent energy, all these learning minds surrounding me, trying to cram in a semester’s knowledge in a weekend.

  Again, my thoughts returned to Ariane.

  It was a bitter feeling, to hope for the best, to hope that she was all right, and knowing good and well that she wasn’t. Everything that had happened to cause her unhappiness had sprung from my own impulsiveness. It was easy enough for me to see that truth when I was in a dark mood, immediately after awakening, when I could not control those parts of myself that I despised. I had thought that I wanted to be free from her (and I did, certainly), but it was only after I had doomed her to her fate that I realized that I wanted more to be absolved of the guilt of my deeds, of my helplessness and brutality.

  Like a child with a broken toy, I wanted her back the way she was before. I wanted her to be restored to her previous state, before I’d awoken after a coffin-contained sleep of but a few months, reduced to a pathetic and vicious monster, and fell insensibly upon the nearest innocent victims. It was a great shame that the only surviving victim was possessed of that infinitely questing mind, and that the victim was a pretty girl, engaged to be married to a man who loved her more than life itself, and who had yet to discover what it was to hate the one you loved.