Kissing Carrion Read online

  Yeah, she likes me “dead,” because it makes me more like Ethan. And the more I’m like Ethan, well—the more I’m like him, the more I count. Just a little.

  And one day, maybe—one of these Infested Toronto days, when there’s nothing left of me to cut away—I’ll find the strength, at long, long last . . .

  —to finally stop pretending.

  No Darkness But Ours

  We will pull down the mountains

  And devour the stars

  And there will be no darkness but ours.

  RHODAJEAN SOKOLUK WALKS with steady steps up the dark highway, toward a blurred mass of thoughts the signs on her path name Toronto. It’s 3:35 on a Thursday morning, late November—though since Arjay’s watch broke eighty miles back, she wouldn’t know. Mickey Mouse’s tiny hands hang loose beneath cracked glass, describing spastic arcs with the jolt of each new stride.

  The night presses down on her with palpable weight, unbroken by headlights, unscarred by neon. A fine mist rises to cover her tracks.

  Somewhere above, a 747 screams.

  Look at her now. Thirteen years old, five feet seven inches. She wears a baggy grey sweatshirt over a brown-and-yellow plaid kilt whose hem barely brushes her knees. Across her flat chest, in pale mauve letters, the legend SACRED HEART OF JESUS BLEEDS FOR YOU may be dimly made out. Her arms swing limp at her sides; slender fingers, meant for a piano’s keys or a guitar’s strings, now tipped by splintered nails and caked with mud. She walks quickly, her eyes never leaving the unseen horizon. It’s cold, but Arjay doesn’t mind.

  Her bare feet leave small, bloody prints in the gravel by the side of the road.

  Arjay’s thin mouth shapes a faint, triangular smile. No need to hurry. What she is coming for has waited this long—a few more hours changes nothing.

  And the air around her takes on a quality suggestive of storm clouds massing to the north, black and heavy with snow.

  Passing her, uncalled images spring to mind—reflections of a cold life in a distant land. Birds hanging frozen from telephone wires; milkweed caught by frost in mid-launch. Shallow bedrock graves.

  * * *

  Take me down baby

  Take me where I wanna go

  Take me down down down

  Baby take me where I wanna go . . .

  “Forget it, booger. ‘S mine, anyway.”

  “Daddy said it was my turn! You don’t play fair!”

  “Says who? Besides, you’ll just break it.”

  Take me down baby now

  Baby take me down

  “Will not!”

  “Will so, booger.”

  “Won’t! And don’t you call me booger!”

  “Why not? Broke it quick enough last time—snot-nose.”

  “Don’t you call me snot-nose, you—rat-turd!”

  All the way down down down

  Baby take me where I wanna goooo . . . .

  “Snot-nose, snot-nose. Booger, booger, booger!”

  Harold Monkson Junior, call him Hank, braces himself for a screech from the back seat. He isn’t disappointed.

  “Dah-dee! Jeannie called me—”

  A booger, and she wasn’t too far off, you little shit.

  “Ronald, If I hear one more peep out of either of you about that Goddam Transformer, it’s straight back to Buffalo and I’m not kidding.”

  Vicious whispers greet this announcement. Under the parental guidebook, they qualify as silence. Hank inhales and coughs, spitting Marlboro smoke. The car reeks of three parts enforced proximity and one part greasy Chinese food. His vision started blurring at the border, and that throbbing just behind his left eye is surely an incipient migraine. And he can’t find one station on this entire radio that isn’t playing fucking disco.

  Take me down baby now

  Take me where I wanna go

  All the way down down down

  Take me where I wanna goooo . . . .

  Christ, yes, Hank pleads, inwardly. Take her. Don’t wait on my account.

  Hank’s a real estate agent. He lives in Toronto, his ex-wife—as of gaining custody—in Buffalo. So far, this simple strategy has kept his visits down to a minimum. But last Sunday, fortified by five beers and the promise of three weeks vacation time, Hank drove down and demanded his fatherly privileges. A decision he has since come to regret.

  Heavily.

  In fact, further discussion on the Transformer notwithstanding, he’s beginning to seriously consider just turning the car around and—

  — driving straight up the white line until he hits a truck.

  What?

  The disco singer croons on, her backup vocalists lapsing into a seemingly endless series of deep, orgasmic grunts. Behind him, Jeannie and Ronald have struck up a blessed truce, Transformer discarded in favor of comics and green Day-Glo Slime. Before him, the road falls away without a moment’s pause, smooth as a lidded eye. Around him, silence.

  But Hank feels a sudden prickling of sweat. He grips the wheel, cold. His palms are wet.

  And he couldn’t tell you why if he tried.

  * * *

  A quarter-moon sweats over Barrie.

  Seven miles gone, police have just entered the last gas station Hank drove by while Jeannie and Ronald set up a steady whine, imploring him for ice cream, phone calls and trips to the little boys’ room. Officer Sam Woo throws the adjacent diner’s kitchen door wide, gun up. The owner lies slumped in one corner, holding a shotgun and wearing a big grin. Nearby, his wife Marie sprawls face down in a tepid pool of rotisserie grease, a stencil of Goofy staring from her discarded apron.

  In the TV lounge of Toronto’s Gorman Manor, a halfway home for newly-released mental patients, a lanky man with grey hair works on a picture of Princess Leia in his Star Wars coloring book. Being very careful to stay within the lines, he gives her red eyes and navy-blue skin. His name is Myron Sokoluk, and he is Arjay’s father.

  Forty miles away and closing, Arjay runs her tongue across her teeth.

  There are no stars left visible to watch.

  * * *

  Jeannie Monkson shifts irritably. She has a whopping crick in her neck.

  Glancing over her shoulder, she sees her brother Booger—a.k.a. Ronald Jerome Monkson—gearing up for yet another whine about how he’s so cold, or he really needs to pee, or can’t we stop for a burger? Like nobody else in the whole wide world was every chilly, or hungry, or waiting for a try at the next available john.

  How’d you like a “mixed-fruit cocktail” instead, Boog? Jeannie thinks, taking mental sight on the back of his head. Kpow, kpow, kpow-pow-pow.

  Nothing happens. She turns away, sighing disgustedly.

  Fact is, there’s shit all to do on these trips with Dad except pick on Booger—no pun intended—and dream about Christopher Walken.

  An utter hunk. Turns MY crank.

  And The Dogs of War—what a bitchin’ flick! Good plot, great locations, and beaucoup de good-lookin’ babes dripping with sweat, up to their necks in mud. What else could you possibly ask for?

  Real life pales by comparison.

  Especially when the most immediate slice of that life involves being trapped in a rented Honda that stinks of stale cigarettes and egg rolls, out in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere with a man she hasn’t seen (or missed seeing) for the last five years, and a little brother she sees constantly every single day of her miserable existence.

  Jeannie scratches idly at her cheek, testing the latest spot where she knows a pimple will sprout before morning.

  Suddenly, she can draw the next three weeks like a map. A stream of lackluster events and petty annoyances, oozing inevitably toward the last big blow-up. Then a ticket home and a stiff good-bye at the station. With no parting gifts. With Booger weeping and drooling all over the seat near the window. With even the fa
intest possibility of a bus accident just stranding them in some roadside dive until Mom’s newest flame can drive them back home, where they’ll be grounded for three more weeks for causing her the trouble.

  Booger stares intently at his left shoe, freckles swollen big as mumps in the dashboard’s light. In the rear-view mirror, Hank’s eyes seem the same red-shot shade of grey as moldy bologna.

  Who are these people? Jeannie thinks. I don’t know. And I don’t care.

  And she sees a hail of bullets peel their faces back to free the blood inside, their brains painting the wilderness.

  Her hand tightens on an imaginary trigger.

  Yes. ANYtime.

  For a split second, she’s all alone in somebody else’s skull. Crushed silent by the view. Walking into the night, every pore gorged on its darkness.

  Just breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

  * * *

  Under the cornfields which bracket the highway, animals stir restlessly in their long sleep, hearing the beat of a measured tread which chills their cold blood even further. A raccoon curls tight, cracking open the end of a rabbit bone as his teeth grind together; sharp white splinters pierce his gums. Mice put their tiny paws over their ears, and burrow deeper. A knot of garter snakes strangles itself.

  An ant-hill’s entire winter supply of eggs withers, as the sole of Arjay’s left foot blocks out the sky.

  Suddenly, she pauses in mid-stride. She sniffs the air.

  A car is coming.

  * * *

  Never, in his dreams, is he Booger. They call him by much sweeter names in the world behind his eyes, which he visits as often as the bark and babble of more mundane reality will let him. That candy-colored world where no one ever yells, whose inhabitants comprise the entire toy section of his mother’s consumer catalogues. Like Chuck E. Cheese, but better. Where it’s his birthday every day.

  Where he is absolute ruler.

  Where Jeannie and Hank lie, screaming, stretched taut on the rack of his fertile imagination.

  In Booger’s world, he is King Ronald, the First and Only. And they call him Master.

  * * *

  Ah.

  Booger’s thoughts graze Arjay, clumsily. They seethe, full of a bile she drinks like wine. Only a sip, though; he’s young.

  She turns her attention to the others.

  Hank. And—Jeannie.

  Scratch them. They bleed as deeply, if all unknowing. Very close. And getting closer.

  Yesss.

  And the hunger grips her, keen as love. Somewhere, someone whispers:

  Feed and be strong, my love. Strong enough to kill them. Or anyone else.

  Strong enough—

  —to eat the world.

  (Time enough for that, though. Later.)

  With one foot on either side of the white line, Arjay turns, and pauses. Folding her arms, she readies herself. She holds up a fallow mirror to those shallow minds rushing toward her, paining her with their petty hopes and dreams. She holds it high, and a reflection grows, a more accurate one than any of them can stand to look at for long.

  When they come, they will find her waiting.

  * * *

  “Are we there yet?”

  For a moment, Hank stares. Jeannie meets his eyes, her own full of a contempt level enough to goad him beyond surprise. He snaps:

  “What do you think?”

  Jeannie leans forward. A smile tugs at her lips; almost, but not quite, a smirk.

  “I think you’re lost—Dad.”

  Click.

  Stepped in it there, didn’t you? someone says conversationally. Traps work both ways, Hank-o. That’s why they come with instructions.

  “Shut up,” he hisses.

  Jeannie recoils.

  Booger’s wide awake now, watching the two of them in rapt fascination. The green Slime drips, forgotten, down the side of his leg.

  Almost as good as TV, Hank thinks. Then: It’s starting.

  What’s starting?

  Christ, I’m getting hysterical.

  Jeannie’s smile has hardened, near enough to grim to call it cousin.

  “Stop the car.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Hank says, automatically.

  Quietly: “So now I’m stupid?”

  Click.

  All right. All. Right.

  “Yeah,” Hank begins. The words are a cut vein, too fast to catch and too wounded to plug. “Yeah, that’s right. You’re a stupid little girl who wears too much makeup, and listens to too much crap on that stupid walkman, and thinks the world owes her something, which it doesn’t. Any more than I do.” Pause. “And what do you think of that?”

  Jeannie’s eyes hold Hank’s. Beneath them, something familiar stirs. Something akin to the same sticky stew of rage currently aboil behind his own.

  “I think you can go fuck yourself,” she says.

  Booger shrieks, clapping his hands next to Hank’s ear with all the subtlety of a mortar shell explosion. “Jeannie said the F-word!” he sings happily.

  “Fuck you too, Booger,” Jeannie shoots back.

  Booger drums his heels on the back of Hank’s seat, transported. “Jeannie said the F-word again!” he howls.

  The road swims before Hank’s eyes. “Shut UP, Booger,” he hears himself say.

  “Dah-dee!”

  Jeannie knocks Booger aside and leans forward. “Gimme the keys.”

  Hank glances back at the road, and finds it whipping by so fast it’s starting to blur.

  We weren’t going this—

  The odometer, spitting miles.

  And Hank realizes that the ache he feels in his leg comes from the fact that he’s been pressing steadily down on the accelerator ever since this conversation began.

  “Jeannie—” he starts. She squeezes—five sharp, pink-and-blue varnished points, stretching his jacket thin enough to rip.

  “Gimme.”

  “The fuck I will!”

  Booger is in seventh heaven. “You said the F-word, Daddy!” he screams, slinging his full prepubescent weight against Hank’s other shoulder.

  Hank cries out in pain.

  It is at exactly this moment that they see Arjay.

  * * *

  At first, a smear of black at the horizon—darkness on darkness. Then a stick-figure, draped in grey. The grey deepens, cross-hatches. She is an old woman now, whose hair hangs like frosted lead. Her shoulders scrape the sky.

  They are twenty feet away. Nineteen.

  With every foot, she is more inevitable. Her face smooths from faint stippling to moon-pale, and equally disinterested, features. She raises her head to greet them, brushing her bangs aside.

  She smiles.

  And their headlights catch her glasses.

  God—

  (No.)

  Abruptly, the world is two white circles. White on white. The dark is gone, and Nothing takes its place.

  Hank, Jeannie and Booger freeze, caught in their glare.

  They see themselves reflected in her eyes.

  * * *

  Far away, Myron Sokoluk’s crayon snaps in two.

  * * *

  Hank swerves, too late. His kick snaps the brakes. They tumble past Arjay in a clumsy arc, and come down hard. Three tires blow simultaneously, hubcaps drawing sparks across the gravel. They strike a handy fence-post and up-end, wavering a moment, before flipping over backward.

  The gas tank goes a second later.

  It’s all a bit too quick for any last thoughts.

  * * *

  Back at the gas station, an officer exiting the rest room exclaims as an orange flower blooms against the sky.

  * * *

  Arjay walks on.

  She passes the shell of Hank’s car, cracked
wide and bleeding blazing lines of oil across the asphalt—steps over one and onto part of another, leaving a sizzling black smear. She doesn’t feel the flames; the damage she has done here is nothing to her. She isn’t sad, or particularly elated. Just full.

  For a while, at least.

  She turns her back, and leaves it all behind.

  North, always north. This is her country. Its frozen soil holds her up, as winter creeps a little closer with every step she takes. It knows her hunger. It knows her need.

  Toronto. And Myron.

  And—then?

  Arjay was born at five in the morning. The Hour of the Ox. When the dead bell rings. Her father lived in a house full of carefully preserved lovers who never answered back, never grew old—just a bit dustier, and less elastic. From this house her mother ran, naked to the Winnipeg night, into the street to flag down the first truck she met. Arjay came a half-year later, suited in blood—her mouth full of half-eaten placenta.

  Her mother took one look at her, and let go.

  Now she moves, a canker on the world’s dreams, past the houses of the unwary. A circle of darkness follows, constant and pure, impinging briefly on all she touches. Leaving scars. A rising flood, leaking through the ill-kept seams of neat yards and tidy gardens. A draining slough of numbness. Sleep.

  And visions which vanish, on waking. Yet remain.

  Arjay knows her path well. An inner compass keeps her steady, marking off the miles.

  She has an appointment to keep.

  Job 37

  Speak to me for Gods sake.

  There are worse things than death,

  though you and I are not likely

  to experience any of them.

  —Pat Lowther.

  —. . . TWO, THREE. OKAY: Looks like we’re go.

  This is session seventeen, research project 4.7, Freihoeven ParaPsych Department; we’re interviewing subjects whose professions are associated, prospectively, with the accumulation of psychic fragments, and this particular tape will be filed under the heading of Job 37.