Needles & Sins (7 page)

And I, for my part, took stricter notice of the relics and various translations of the Bible that seemed suddenly to multiply throughout her house. And in taking such notice, I shat upon them.

Uncouth, I know. But even devils have their pride to uphold…or unload.

She answered by spiking my beer with the mead of St. Michael. I nearly choked to death on my first honeyed draught. “Bitch!” I screamed, my throat hissing with holy smoke. The icy broken glass tinkle of laughter shattered from above.

“You should take more care with what you put in your mouth,” she warned.

After that, before I sucked them, I rubbed down her breasts with the effluence of an Etruscan whore I knew from the Carnival. Better safe than sorry. Angel shivered at the pollution, but her distaste still turned to ecstasy when I put my fevered lips to her.

Until the final line was drawn.

“Come to the Dark Carnival with me,” I said. She was frying a snow white fish in the balm of etheria. Angel looked at me with eyes wide and frozen blue, and simply said, “No.”

“Come with me to see where my strength lies,” I begged once more, and she only shrugged.

“Will you step with me into the light of the City?” she said. “Will you kiss the brows of refugees and coddle the concerns of the just with no thought for yourself?”

I admitted that I could not.

She flipped the fish in the invisible grace of its oily etheria.

“Then I cannot accompany you either.”

And so the division was stated.

From there, it only grew combative.

She lined my shorts with the dust of chaste and dowdy Dominican nuns. And I filled her bathtub with the curdled blood of suicidal goth girls.

Our skins prickled at the thought of each other.

No more did our lovemaking bring ecstasy. Now we only brought each other damnation and salvation…the opposite of whatever the other wished.

Her loins joined to mine like the iceberg to the Titanic…without frenzy or favor, just relentlessness…she dragged me down to desperation, just as I burned her saintliness to a hairs-breadth of damnation.

««—»»

I was walking though the barrier of the grey lands, when the messenger found me.

“Devil,” she said, prostrating herself on bloody palms and wounded knees before me.

“Rise,” I instructed, and enjoyed the strangely rolling arc of her eyes, and the wrinkled crimson signature of her broken jaw. Her head and shoulder twitched every few seconds in a catatonic rhythm.

“If you visit the heaven whore again,” she said, “you will live in the wastelands of loss forever.” She hiccoughed, and a stream of blackened blood spattered the ground at my feet.

“And you are?”

“I am Benevi, whore of the last dick-tator.”

“Fuck him,” I suggested, and stepped away.

“Wait,” she begged, clutching at my bony heels. But I did not stay.

I knew, nevertheless, that my time with Angel was almost up. We were at war, hell was upon me for my indiscretion, and the hole in my chest could not widen much farther. Heaven and hell should only come so close.

««—»»

“I bring you the heart of a virgin,” I announced amid the pristine coral white of her bedchamber. In my hand, dripping crimson blood, I did, indeed, hold the naked organ of an earthly innocent.

Angel fainted.

I held the heart above her mouth and squeezed, until the blood dripped down her lips and eyes and stained the sheets like faded lipstick.

“Drink, my darling,” I begged.

Instead, she spit.

“Bastard,” she said. “Who was she?”

“You would have preferred a him?” I asked.

“I would have preferred your balls in a blender!”

I had no response to that.

“I sacrificed her for your honor,” I explained.

“And I piss in your mouth for her memorial,” she returned.

An arc of dismissal did indeed emanate from the area where, formerly, we had coupled. She peed steaming holy water in my face. Hardly heavenly.

I grabbed her around the neck and squeezed with intent, but she only grinned purity, and kneed me in the groin.

“You should control your temper,” I suggested.

“You should control your deceit,” she returned.

“You ignorant bitch,” I screamed.

I’m sure the scream was the key. For the first time in our relationship, my damnable anger overtook me and fire literally poured from my mouth to limn and blacken the beautifully angelic face of my love. Her scowl was rimmed in the light of a puritan moon. She didn’t take it well.

She never even touched the ravage my fury had made of her face. It would rebuild itself in eternity. “Damn you to hell,” she cried at last.

“Too late.”

“Ahhhh!” she moaned, frustrated beyond words. With five heavenly nails she gouged hard at the well-traveled scars of my face. And with holy spit she burned the light from my eyes.

“I hate you!” she proclaimed.

“I love you!” I returned.

We were both wrong.

No creature from heaven can feel in the right way for a creature of hell, and vice versa. God and Satan must have laughed in tandem. Whatever we felt, it was anathema. We were doomed by our attachment.

I threw her to the ground and cackled. Imagine the worst horror movie villain giving a chilling warning of esoteric humor. It was ghastly. Frightening. Subversively sublime.

She seemed nonplussed.

But I kicked her in the head repeatedly until her iceberg eyes fluttered back and closed.

Angels should never fight with demons. We’re so, so much more desperate.

I left my Angel’s home at the outer edge of the City of Light and fled, as if a criminal, to the Grey Lands. Not that I had to worry…regardless of who succumbed in this round of violence, we were both eternal.

I spent many hours there, walking in desperation…wondering if I had crossed, not the line, but the very border of existence.

But a demon can never escape the bounds of his prison, and so I was only punished more for my transgression; not by Satan, but by my Angel’s own desperate deeds. Desperation is our calling card in the Dark Carnival. We one-up each other with every desolate day.

I never wished to take her heaven from her. I envied her that salvation.

After I left her in her tomb of light, I wandered the twilight of the Grey, and kicked in the heads of those who came in my path. They came to me in obeisance, since my aura still reeked of the scent of salvation of the City of Light, and as they kneeled before me, begging my aid, I put a razor-edged boot to their foreheads and grinned like a sickly clown. “Zombo to you,” I spat.

Their souls fled to the next level of damnation as ethereal brain matter spattered the ashes of the ground.

But my destructive glee was short-lived. Our fight had driven Angel to another form of destruction. Self.

On the horizon, I spied a shooting star in the deep blue of night. It’s always night in the Grey Lands. The heavens spat out a star, and it fell. It fell angrily, sputtering purple and white light in a whirl. I hurried forward, eager to see the pit of its death.

My feet pummeled the earth in pursuit, but I could not beat its path to the lost land of the borderland. By the time I arrived at its impact zone, it had already arisen.

It was a she.

Fire still bled from her hair and limbs, but I knew without a doubt whose soul had fallen from heaven.

Her white hair still flared a taunting challenge, and her lips puckered red at my gaze. Her once beautiful snowy wings were ruined; two blackened, spiny limbs were all that remained. My Angel shook her head once, twice, and then her ivory legs pumped hard and she ran, ran, ran away from me to hide deep in the caverns of the Grey Lands. But no matter how fast she ran, I knew that she could never outrace my love. And at the same time, I knew that my love could never offer her the solace of heaven.

I hurried to meet her burning soul.

The beginning.

— | — | —

She was newly born; her face gave it away. The shadows of death hadn’t marked her yet. The smudgepot glow of the stagelight flickered bloodily on lily pure cheeks as she gaped, aghast at the spectacle. I moved to intercept before some other eater caught the scent of her naiveté. She was angelfood. Pure vanilla-spun sugar.

“Just another Saturday night,” I said, slipping an arm wreathed in the ink of demons and skulls around her shoulders. She didn’t shrug me away, as I’d expected. I chalked her acceptance down to shock, not invitation.

“I don’t understand,” she said. Her voice was a whisper of sadness. The lovers before us mortified her. I didn’t know how she had ended up here. Maybe she was reborn right there, in that spot, and opened her eyes to see the depraved sex show as the first vision in her new home; it happens. Regardless, she remained utterly disconnected.

Angelfood indeed. Innocent and clueless.

“It’s just sex.” I squeezed her bird-thin shoulders. I hesitated in pulling her closer, worried I would snap her in half unintentionally. Death was like that. A land of unintended consequences.

“But they’re…they’re…”

“Bloody?”

She nodded, unable to verbalize the horror that coupled in front of us as the entertainment for an audience of shadowed thousands all around.

On the stage, a man and a woman did, indeed, rut without regard to the spectators. But unlike an underground sex show hidden just off the Times Square police beat, this couple were not, in any way, pretty to see. The woman was thick in the waist and long of burnished bronze hair. It was impossible to tell her age, not that age meant anything here anyway. But if she had wrinkles or grey hair or sagging breasts…it was all moot now. The scroll of her life had been skinned off, leaving only her true self. A skein of veins and slippery muscle leavening shape atop ligaments and bone.

The man, gangly with silver hair and an odd, spastic jerk in his lovemaking rhythm was in the same, blood-slick state. His teeth were bared from the loss of his lips, making him appear apish, inhuman. He had mounted her missionary style on the bare stage, and the floor around them was slick with their sweat and semen and mostly, blood. The scent of their bodies bled from the stage like the perfume of the slaughterhouse—warm, rich, and redolent of iron. Both screamed with every thrust of penetration, as their stripped, shining muscles shivered and shimmered together. He took her close, wrapping bloody, meaty arms around her. Their raw muscles slapped together wetly, unencumbered by hair or skin, an abomination. They flowed together into a single large, writhing travesty of exposed, twisted sinew and shrieking pleasure. My new friend turned away and buried her face in my chest.

“Why do they keep doing it?” she cried. “Who skinned them?”

I shrugged. “It just happens. The exaggeration of balance. With ultimate pleasure comes the ultimate pain of scourge.”

“But they’re screaming! Where is the pleasure in that?”

“Look at their fingers grasping at each other,” I said, pushing her gaze back to the stage. “It’s as if they want to climb inside each other; with their skin gone, they almost can. They can also feel every touch a thousand times more intensely. Look at their tongues. Watch the urgency of their fucking, the desperate way they pull closer even as the equal and opposite force of pain drives their throats to scream. They feel it
all
. They are in ecstasy as much as anguish.”

She shook her head, completely disgusted. I saw her eyes light as she took in the room behind me, around us. “Where are we?”

“The Amphitheater. Love given and broken every hour. When they finish, some of the crowd will dine on their remains until they are born again. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

She followed me out of the crowd, but when we stepped onto the street, she looked up into my eyes, and no doubt saw the hunger there. The blood may already have been beading on my forehead and face; my body thirsted for the heat of her, the sweat of her, so close, so close.

She pushed against my chest with her hand and then squealed something, before turning to clatter down the alley in a panicked, staggering dash. I started to follow, but then relaxed. There’d be other food inside tonight, and she was, maybe, too green to choose yet. As the click of her heels faded, I thought that the first thing she needed to do was to get herself some sensible shoes. This place was bad enough without having blisters on your feet.

««—»»

God knows how she survived her first night without getting flayed. But I saw her again, a day or two later, still unblemished. She was picking through a produce cart in the market square, looking for an apple. I saw her lift one, hold it up to the light and press it to her face to inhale the scent. Her eyes sparkled in the dull, wormy fog of morning for a moment as she breathed in the ripe tang of the fruit, but then her brow wrinkled, and two things happened almost at the same time.