Gypsy Blood (38 page)

Carnival kept looking. He still couldn’t get it.

“He ate me.”

Carnival kept on looking. Sometimes that’s all you can really do.

“He ground me up and ate me.”

Looking and staring and not knowing what to do.

“He ground me up and ate me and then you ate him.”

Family Feast

C
arnival stood there listening as his Momma told him how his Poppa had buried her. It started at her funeral. Actually it started before that, in her death tent.

It was bad luck to die inside your house. A true Rom, when struck a death blow will rise up and walk outside so that he can die beneath the sun and sky. When Poppa knew that Momma was dying he built her a little tent out of bent willow boughs and deer hide. This was a traditional death tent so that the gypsy might spend their last days in comfort beneath the open sky without the fear of bringing bad luck to the wagon.

There was always someone sitting with Momma. It is bad luck to die alone. We kept a chair between us because it is also bad luck to touch the dying. They were Gypsies, persecuted since time first learned how to tick. They know a lot about bad luck.

Momma held one leg of the chair and Carnival held the other so that she could take a bit of his strength to ease her passing, and that he might keep a bit of her magic to ease his life. It was a kind of symbiotic mourning. The gypsy traditions are ancient and quite impartial.

“I will bury you under the open sky, Momma. I will dig the grave deep so that I can bury you walking.”

She smiled at that. Carnival was so young at that time, but he remembered her smile; better than he remembered sunlight.

“Dancing,” she corrected. “You must bury me dancing.”

“Momma,” he promised. “I will bury you dancing. With ribbons about your head and hair.”

Then Poppa came and he caught hold of Momma even though it was bad luck. He wrapped her in three black blankets and picked her up and carried her away. Carnival tried to stop him. He was so young. Poppa kicked Carnival away as if he were a dog. Carnival never found out what Poppa had done with her. Poppa never told. Even later, when Carnival beat him and caged him, he wouldn’t tell what he’d done to her.

Momma remembered the tent. She remembered Poppa’s arms about her, those three black blankets, stinking of basement and dirt. She remembered how he’d carried her into the wagon and drove away. She was too weak to struggle. He drove her to a cottage. He carried her into the room. That had been the worst of it, to die in a room, when she’d tried so long to be a true gypsy. He’d stood over her glowering. She saw him and through the cloying dark fibers of the blankets he looked a little like her own father.

How far we run, she thought, and what little distance do we truly cover.

Then he cut her up and pushed her meat and bones into a meat grinder and baked her into meat pies. And then he ate her. It took him nineteen days to finish. Bite after bite, grimly choking it down, a nineteen day marathon of meat pie.

And because of the magic, Momma felt every bit of it, down into the darkness of his stomach and his soul.

The Knife and the Scarf

C
arnival sat there while Momma told him how it all had happened.

“Do you know what I did?” he asked her when she had finished her telling.

“I remember the fight,” she said. “How old were you?”

“I was twenty. Poppa and I had been arguing. The same old argument.”

It all came running back like blood spilling from a freshly reopened wound.

“Poppa, what did you do with her body?”

“That is not for you to know.”

“She was my Momma.”

“She was my wife before that. It is not your place to know.”

And then Carnival slapped him. Poppa stood up. He was not a tall man but he was dark and solid as an iron stove. He was dressed in a loose white shirt with a woven vest and a tall top hat. There was a pheasant feather and a black silk ribbon woven three times about the brim and a long red scarf which he unwrapped from his neck. He threw one end of the scarf at Carnival in a whip like motion.

It was to be a fight.

Carnival took out his knife and Poppa drew his. The two gypsies took an end of that scarf in their teeth. Carnival had seen Poppa dance and fight and he knew how quick the old man could be, yet he surprised Carnival when he struck with the knife.

He caught Carnival on the cheekbone – leaving a scar that nearly covered the first scar Poppa gave him – the two, bleeding into one. Carnival pulled back not letting go of the scarf. He felt the blood sliding down into the corners of his mouth.

So this is what my blood tastes like, he thought.

He reached out, long and low, aiming for Poppa’s stomach. Poppa danced backwards, not letting go of the scarf, and as he danced Carnival brought his knife up and into Poppa’s heart. Carnival knelt with Poppa as he fell, not letting go of the scarf, chanting even as the old man began to die. He wouldn’t let him slip away.

Carnival drew him into himself, using the magic that he’d learned to bind the old man’s spirit next to his heart. He had to know what Poppa had done with his mother.

Even then he wouldn’t tell Carnival.

Even after Carnival cut his Poppa’s heart out and ate it whole.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

M
omma stood in front of Carnival wearing her Stevie Nicks lookalike borrowed body.

Carnival remembered the taste of his father’s heart.

Momma in Poppa and Poppa in me.

We’re like dolls, Carnival thought. Like those Ukrainian nesting belly dolls that you unscrew and find another doll inside it, and when you unscrew that you find another doll. Dolls within dolls within dolls.

Like puppets.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Why would he?”

“So I’ve been keeping all three of us together?”

“Mother, father, son. The earthly trinity, three in one. It’s kind of romantic.”

“What can I do to fix it?”

Momma shrugged.

“Maybe there is nothing to fix. My family put their hooks in me, so that even when I died I remembered my father’s stern face.”

Carnival looked at her face, seeing her eyes beneath the Fleetwood Mac mask.

Maybe she was right. Families have long hungry roots.

She kept talking and explaining. “We can’t get anywhere from our past. We build it and hang it and wrap it about ourselves. We drink it and eat it, and it makes us whole.”

Maybe she was truly right. Carnival would never forget her.

“Now finish what you started,” she said. “You must call the Blood God down from his place between the stars.”

She looked at Carnival, and for just an instant he thought he was looking at someone else besides Momma, behind the masquerade of borrowed flesh.

“You must call the Red Shambler.”

A Bathtub Full of Blood

I
t was sloppy work.

He ought to have a silver cauldron full of blood but all he had was the bathtub, spray painted with silver auto primer.

Some racing stripes might be nice.

“Be serious, old man,” Momma chided Poppa. “This is serious work.

All right, forget about the stripes. Perhaps just a few lucky numbers, and a stuffed dog with a wobbly head. Something tacky, but tasteful.

Carnival lit some amber incense. Even that had to be a compromise. He could have bought some of the good stuff at the magic shop but Olaf didn’t have enough in his wallet to warrant that. So he settled for burning some dime store fragrance in the same flower pot he’d used to call Momma the first time, along with an amber ring that someone had left behind at a palm reading.

“Amber is as amber does,” Momma said. “The glitter is nothing but a gleam in your eye.”

She was right. Magic was more about spirit than literal translation.

Finally everything was ready.

Carnival sent Momma to the basement where she’d be safe.

Then he climbed into the tubful of blood, making the necessary incantations.

He saw a red glow forming on the left side of the bathroom. Damn. He’s coming straight through the mirror. Carnival caught a deep breath and ducked beneath the blood. The Blood capital-g God was here.

The Red Shambler.

He was huge, way larger than a bathroom ought to hold. He shambled closer. It was a tight fit for something that lived in the spaces between the stars. Carnival held his breath, down beneath the blood. He kept his eyes open. The blood stung like eyecups full of rubbing alcohol, but he kept the God in sight.

Don’t take your eyes off of this one. He’s dangerous.

Carnival didn’t think the Red Shambler saw him. The space between the stars is dark, and his tentacled eyes would probably take a while to adjust to earthly light.

What a mind. A guess and a bullseye, every time.

Then he caught scent of the blood. The bristles about his jowls quivered like a thousand horny micro-penises. Carnival strained concentration into his hands, cold in this tubful of refrigerated blood, trying to hang onto the gift he had for the Red Shambler.

The Red Shambler oozed closer.

He lowered his snout into the offering tub.

And then Carnival rose up and circled the neck of the Blood-God with a golden chain.

“Surprise!”

He’d belled a cat.

Talking to the Blood God

B
e careful son. Owning a god is like owning a large dog. It’s good to have but you never know when you might get bit.

The Red Shambler loomed over Carnival. He didn’t like what the Gypsy had done to him. Carnival couldn’t blame him one bit.

I’d be pissed off too if somebody threw a leash over me, wouldn’t you? Oh wait a minute. Somebody already has.

“Funny, Poppa.”

“Set me free,” the Red Shambler rumbled.

He was big, amorphous and gelatinous like a giant swollen blood cell pumped with protoplasm and red hot lava. The chain looked dainty about the brute’s neck. Carnival had pieced it together out of gold chains he’d bought at three separate pawn shops, verifying the gold content with a jeweler who he’d helped out of a jam with a cursed gemstone once.

Getting the proper purity was very important for chaining a god of this high a caste. Too much alloy in the collar, and you’re guaranteed the same sort of outcome as someone who tries to tame a
Bengal
tiger with a licorice whip and a milking stool.

“What do you want?” the Red Shambler asked.

Carnival was translating loosely. What the old god had really said was how much he’d like to drag every cell of blood from Carnival’s body and spew them into a whirling maelstrom in the bottom of hell’s outhouse so that each cell felt the shrieking burning kisses of a thousand years of unholy damnation turdlets.

“A favor,” Carnival answered, tightening the leash.

Gods can be awfully stupid sometimes. You have to keep reminding them whose finger was on what trigger.

You’re guessing again.

“Life is one big guess, Poppa.”

It’s true. We make it up as we go. There’s no one in the history of magic who could have been stupid enough to try a stunt like this. This was impossible. A long cold walk down the edge of a one thousand yard slippery razor blade, for sure. There he was – standing knee deep in refrigerated blood, trying to ignore the shiver and the stink, his hands cold and cloying with slow clotting blood, hanging onto the dubious salvation of a long skinny patched-up chain of pawn shop gold.

Carnival felt right at home.

“Don’t fuck with a gypsy. We trained your kind as lap dogs, back before the stars had names.”

He tugged the leash a little tighter.

“What do you want?” the Red Shambler asked.

“I want you to turn a vampire. I want you to make her mortal. Release the chains that bind her to the night.”

The master plan unfolds. You’ll free the vampire, and live happily ever after. Such intellect, such Machiavellian plotting. The cunning wondrous intricacy of a thumbless origami sculptor.

Carnival grinned, allowing Poppa that one well placed dig.

“We Gypsies are a shrewd lot.”

The Red Shambler was unimpressed.

“Release me from my chain,” it ordered.

Carnival almost laughed. It was funny. It was so funny that he felt he had to let go of the chain.