Nothing But Blackened Teeth, page 6
“Shut. Up.” Phillip squeezed the bridge of his nose until the skin beneath blotched. “Shut the fuck up. Shut up, or I’m going to—”
“You’re not going to do anything. Lin isn’t wrong.” What I’d wanted to say was we shouldn’t have come here, that there was no reason to stay. I thought of Talia and her sighs, one for every season, the drop of a paisley summer dress along the back of her knees, the breeze in her dark hair, how the dead would suckle the memories from her marrow and be warm for a moment on that. I thought—
I strangled the idea in a fist, took a long breath. “And if you two start fighting, who the fuck is going to do the rescuing? Isn’t that your job? You’re the all-star quarterback, aren’t you? The hero? You’re supposed to—”
“Die,” Lin whispered.
But Phillip seemed mesmerized, and he gazed at me, mouth slack. I thought of new corpses lying quietly in shallow pools, still lukewarm to the touch, eyes and mouth open as though wedged open with wonder. But slowly, Phillip’s tepid stare came alive as I continued to murmur, Scheherazade-like, about everything and nothing, the yokai settling into odalisque poses, an eye-watering collage.
“I guess—no, you’re right. We have to—”
“There’s a library.” Faiz surprised us all with his voice, his proximity. His eyes burned, their heat an infection. And he kept licking at his upper lip, broad and inquisitive strokes of the tongue, the muscle inflamed, red and swollen with veins. “There’s got to be information there.”
“Faiz, no,” I began.
He sniffed. In the lantern light, his face was more pink than red, more muscle and clotting fluids than skin. Despite the crosshatching of injuries, Faiz seemed docile, almost. “There’s a book. There has to be a book. There’s always a book—”
“Christ, dude. Your face,” said Lin.
“There’s a book,” said Faiz again. “I know there’s a book.”
“Dude, that’s just fiction. In real life, people don’t just leave around solutions like, like it’s some kind of video game,” I said. “We have to go. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Talia, but we’re going to need to leave. It’s too late. We should go. We should go. We need to go. You need help.”
“Talia would have stayed for you,” Faiz intoned.
No. No, she wouldn’t have, I thought. But I couldn’t say it, not with the life hollowed out of Faiz’s face, pupils pulled to pinholes. His voice was a monotone. “I—”
“You and Lin can go,” Phillip said, generous to a sin. “We’ll stay.”
“Okay,” said Lin.
“No.” Faiz’s hand shot out, rattlesnake-quick, to trap the smaller man’s wrist in his grip. Pain spasmed across Lin’s face. I could hear the crunch of ligament as his palm folded into itself, thumb pushed so far inland that a muscle juddered in Lin’s forearm. But it didn’t look like Faiz was out to injure; his expression stayed dreamy, almost drunk. He squeezed and Lin made a noise low in his ribs. “We have to do this together.”
“Let go,” Lin growled.
Phillip, refereeing: “Be reasonable. If they want to leave—”
Faiz shook his head. The hairs on the nape of my neck tufted. Nausea welled as he turned his attention to Phillip and me, head drooping at an angle. His eyes—
Read a hundred books on horror, and you’ll find that every last one possesses at least one mention of someone’s eyes gone strange, unfocused and unsettling to witness. I’d always thought it sounded kitschy, hammy, a lazy trope implanted into the creative subconscious by sub-par mentors, pure Hollywood dross. But the look tenanting Faiz’s eyes remedied those preconceptions. All the lights were on, and all the ghosts were home too. It wasn’t the face of a killer, or the face of a suicide, but someone too exhausted to be either, which was somehow all the worse. When you’re tired enough, you’ll do anything for sleep.
“We have to do the ritual,” Faiz said, no variation in intonation.
“What?”
“The hitobashira ritual. We have to do it. It’d give Talia back. I know it.”
Lin’s voice spiked. “We’re not burying someone to get your fucking girlfriend back.”
“I’ll be the sacrifice. She’s my fiancée. I’ll … I’ll be the one to do it.” Faiz somnambulated through phrases: enunciation gone, the crispness of his voice diluted by misery.
“We’re not burying you,” I said. “We’re not going to bury you alive. That’s just not happening.”
“He’s crazy,” Lin whispered, expression inscrutable. The space between his thin brows creased. “Plum-stirring mad, although I suppose anyone who was forced to stir plums for hours would go mad. Is that how the line goes? Plum-stirring mad? Plum mad? I don’t know. It’s such a weird whatchamacallit, don’t you—ow.”
“Faiz,” I said. “Dude, I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re scared for Talia. I understand it hurts. I understand.”
Every hurt I’d ever experienced, every pain accreted from a twenty-four-year pileup of rib-rupturing mistakes distilled into stilted sentences, a look on my face that I hoped said exactly what I needed to say. Faiz stared, the pink tip of his tongue held between his teeth, and slowly, his expression drained to agony.
“You don’t understand any of this.” He spat, choppily, nearly in tears again, the pitch of his voice going stratospheric towards the end. The yokai applauded. Of course, they’d love it. “You’ve never had a proper relationship. You don’t know what it’s like to need someone, to love someone, to—to give a shit. You don’t know because you’re always too busy running away to whatever new fucking thing you have waiting. You don’t understand. You never—”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Phillip, trying to run interference again, but there wasn’t a need. Faiz fell to his knees, Lin’s arm finally surrendered, and banged his fists against his ears, crying freely, the sound a scream chaptered into sobs. Phillip followed him down to the tatami, which was no longer pure, no longer clean, rot spiraling through the straw as Lin rubbed at his wrist, the long pale column of his arm boxed in finger marks.
Noting my attention, Lin flicked his gaze up, wrote a circle in the air with a trembling finger, mouthed the word crazy. I couldn’t tell who he meant. Faiz or him or me or the entirety of our codependent coven, our audience besides, the blind damning the blind, a theatre of dead fools. I swallowed vomit, thin as gruel and warm. My vision had ceased to gyre but it wouldn’t stop bobbing, and I felt like I’d been anchored to the bottom of a pond, looking up through a mirror of green water. I thought of girls nibbled by fish and freshwater prawns, their ribs like combs, how long it’d take for a corpse to be whittled to bone by such a harmless menagerie. I thought of death again, and unclean things stirring in the mud.
“Do we even know there’s a book there?” I heard myself say.
“Of course there is. We saw them when we got in. This place, this place is rotten with books. There were libraries everywhere. We’re going to have answers there. I know.”
“Jesus.” Lin stared out the door. I followed his gaze to where blind eyes, bulbous and luminous as fresh grapes, clustered in the gap. They blinked, skin frothing up from inside the mass, and, for a moment, they became scrotal-like. “Jesus, it’s the whole fucking house, Cat.”
“They don’t need to stay if they don’t want to,” said Phillip.
I dampened my lips, licked the sour from the cracked flesh. “People die when they split up. We gotta stay together. Besides, it can’t be that far away—”
“Next room.”
“See?” A smile twitched feebly. “Not far away.”
“Did you just literally say we should stay? Cat.” Lin’s voice, coming up from behind me, nails shoveling into my collarbone. “What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing?”
I whirled on him, all teeth. “We’re not splitting up.”
“Fuck.”
“Jesus, you fucking pieces of—” Phillip roared into the clamor, shutting us all up. “Just—just fucking stop. I’m so sick of you fucking idiots. Single file. Let’s just fucking get to the library. If there’s no book, you two leave. We’ll go on ahead.”
“Always the hero, aren’t you?” Lin giggled, but no one’d look at him twice, not that he cared, content with his lunacy. Through all of it, Faiz said nothing, watched the door like his true love stood in the slit, bubbling with eyes, so many of them now, bubbles spilling from the mouth of a Coke bottle. “Bet Faiz loves it. Bet Faiz loves the idea you’d be the one who has his back. Bet it’d turn out great for you.”
“Shut up, Lin,” I said.
“We’re going to regret this.”
I ignored him. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 7
It wasn’t so much a library as much as it was an archive of corpses, manuscripts chewed up by the centuries, edges winnowed by insects. Their leather festered with mold, with mushrooms, wide-brimmed with fluting bodies, tiered like cheap apartments and blanched by the half-light. Some could barely be labeled as books anymore, their paper digested then regurgitated as building material. There were so many of them. Wasp nests, almost intestinal in look, built atop the remains of a termitarium, its inhabitants long dead. Suddenly, I was reminded of dried alveoli, pressed and preserved between glass, something an old girlfriend had shown off between kisses in the classroom.
“There’s a book here.”
“Yes,” I said, voice hoarse. I thought the same things that Lin and Phillip must have been thinking, the two exchanging uncertain expressions, Lin’s madness receded to a jouncing energy, Phillip’s face closed up like a casket as he set candles through the room. There was certainly a book here. There were countless books here, adrift in dead insects and wriggling ivory larvae.
The yokai had followed us, a conga line of myths, repeating between themselves hello. Hello. Hello. Like infants or parrots, or maybe something fresh-born and wetly glistening, amazed to have larynx and lips, the zygote of a vocabulary. Hello, the kitsune sang to each other. Hello, said the kappa, the red-faced oni, the gashadokuro, bent low and crawling on its knuckles. Hello.
“I—” Faiz fluttered his hands before sweeping a stack of mouldering books into the cradle of an arm. “Why are you all just standing around? Let’s look.”
Phillip plunged into the labour, both hands, no doubts at all, and dug into the refuse like a dog, his mouth chewing through prayers or curses, I couldn’t tell which. Couldn’t tell if it mattered, not with the fever of his articulation. Lin and I exchanged a look, anxious.
“This is bullshit.” Lin put to the voice what we’d both been thinking, but we all knew there wouldn’t be follow-through. The only way out was through a door teeming with yokai, their fingers clenched all around the doorway. Hello, they whispered. Hello, hello. “There is no way we’re going to find anything in here. There’s no way there’s anything to find. This is a fool’s errand. And how the fuck are you even sure that Talia—”
“Ah-hah!”
Lin startled, stumbled back. Faiz staggered to us in a kind of bowlegged trot, no bend to his joints, no cadence. His palm bookmarked a massive ledger, the vellum spidered with black characters. He slapped the page, once, twice, four times, arrhythmic yet with intent, like he was freestyling a new argot of Morse code. Jabbed a finger at the crosshatching of lines, face shining with triumph.
“Everything we need,” he said.
I flicked a look down. The lines regarded me in return: ink-stroke eyes between the characters, mouths in the logograms. I swallowed. “Faiz.”
“It says—” He tapped the opened page. Silverfish writhed across the paper over and around and between the web of his fingers, antennae slick with light. The iconography on the pages made no sense, black scratches imposed by an alien hand. They bloomed beneath Faiz’s fingers and the pages went black, and through the glass of the ink, something grinned. “That this place is consecrated to the Four Kings, and each of them requires a different sacrifice.”
“There’s nothing on the fucking page,” Phillip said, quiet, in that way he did when he was genuinely angry, a hum in the backbeat of his voice. “It’s just mould.”
“A bit of blood, a bit of bone, a bit of cum,” Faiz retorted, his cheeks blotching red. “A bit of organ. Four cardinal directions. Four Kings. That’s what it says. Cat?”
“I’m staying out of this.”
I gave Phillip a look, hoping he’d get what I was trying to telegraph: let him have this. Maybe we might get lucky. Maybe all the yokai wanted was for us to panic, kick around a few old books, cry, then they’d let us out with Talia a little worse for wear. Either way, I wasn’t going to correct Faiz. Not now with the Sword of Damocles metronoming over our heads, shaving the moments into halves, into quarters, into an infinitely replicating prism of drawn-out pauses, underscored with a war chant of: this was a fucking mistake. If Faiz was right, if the myths were true, Talia lay buried with every dead girl to have been entombed in this place. How many minutes and how many hours before she suffocated on soil?
Phillip laved his tongue over his mouth, licking the sweat from his upper lip, and tried to smile even though it made him look like a goldfish drowning on dry air.
I grimaced and tried not to stare at the walls.
“A bit of organ.” Faiz had aged sixty years in six hours. Not literally. Although you’d think he had, if all you saw were his mirror image in the fusuma. The house had made a twin of Faiz in its walls, aged that calligraphed version of him into some kind of hairless Chow Chow, thick-faced and jowly, sad eyes downturned in a face wadded like dough. Who knew that dead feudal lords could be so petty? “I’ll do it.”
“What?” I shot my head up.
“I’ll do it,” he repeated, even as his gold-leafed doppelgänger creased and crinkled, the paper ripping into a train of mouths. I could smell out-of-season zelkova and frangipani, spider lilies the color of arteries, incense and grave dirt, the odour so thick you could knot it into a noose. “Life doesn’t have any meaning without her, anyway. I can’t—I don’t want to go on in a world without her. I’ll do it. I’ll cut out my heart. I’ll—”
I slapped him. “What the fuck?”
It was a good slap. More of an open-palm hook, his jaw crunching where the joint met the heel of my hand. The blow rattled through both of us so hard that it made me bite my tongue. Blood dripped warm down the eave of my scowl, dotting the now-rotten tatami with red. A breeze billowed past us, a stench too: cardamom and mildew and menstrual flow. Around us, the yokai in the murals jeered and snickered in Chaplinesque quiet: ink-stroke tanuki and painted tengu, kitsune drawn with six strokes of a master’s brush, a two-dimensional heron gorgeted in carnelian, the color so bright you’d think someone had slit its throat.
“You’re not cutting your fucking heart out. What the fucking fuck do you think this is? A fucking Shakespeare tragedy or some fucking shit like this? We’re not fucking letting you—”
Faiz never got angry. Except when he did. He roared up like a bear, like someone who’d run out of reasons to keep breathing, fists balled around the loss of his bride-to-be, his almost-wife. I squared my feet and jutted my chin. Faiz was tall when he wasn’t slouched over, six feet even on the rise of his toes, quarterback shoulders. He could have been a somebody but all he ever wanted to be was somebody to someone, a husband, a family man, a dream he’d coddled since he was ten.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” Like hell I was going to stand down for an ego swollen as an alcoholic’s liver, bruised black, bleeding warm pus and grief. Mourning’s got a way of making men out of mice, I tell you. I shoved him and he leaned hard into the push, one arm brought up over his head.
“Whoa, guys—” Wonderboy Phillip, glossy as the cover of Forbes, hundred-dollar clean fade and a jawline to slice open your heart, slid between us. You could always count on Phillip to save the day. Forget the initial argument. He had room to play hero.
“Fuck off.” I stomped a heel into his calf, a thumb’s length south of the back of his knee, snarling as I spun away. Phillip slung me a wounded-dog look, the candle-glow picking out the gold in his hair. In the next room, a perfect black silhouette on white rice paper, kanemizu on ivory, the ohaguro-bettari sat and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.
CHAPTER 8
“Don’t touch me,” said Faiz.
“Jesus. We’re all friends here, man.” Phillip held his palms up, guiltless as a madonna, features twitching through the permutations of a smile. He had lost the trick of the expression, somehow, somewhere between arrival and the time that Faiz wrenched out his own tooth, a strand of red nerve whipping through the half-gold light.
We could be dead.
You’d think it’d be harder. But if you’re desperate enough, you can shovel under the gum with your nails, digging out sickle-moons of bleeding pink flesh until the bicuspid loosens, pre-slickened with blood, and you can anchor a grip around the root and pull. At least we’d kept him from cutting out his heart. At least there was that. Faiz had fucked his own hand raw, trying to eke out a little bit of spunk to drip into the floorboards. But it could have been worse.
“If you were my friend, you’d let me die—”
He pushed and Phillip did not yield, a summer romance with the runway separating the two, Phillip’s post-collegiate musculature longer, leaner, still built to be loved by the light. Next to the other man, Faiz looked old, tired, middle-aged before his season. “Are you listening to yourself? Do you have any idea how melodramatic you sound?”
I sat down as the two continued to bicker, chest to calisthenics-honed chest, shoulders scissored back, like one of them was on the precipice of inviting the other to waltz. On the walls, the yokai danced like they invented the idea, pirouetting through genres and periods, Nara to Muromachi, every shogunate of literati painting, austere to aureate, twelve bodies to a cosmic tango.
“You okay?” Lin touched fingers to my shoulder.
I looked up into his narrow face, kabuki pale, shaped like some kumadori artist had taken a brush to his bones, all slant and sharpness. A fox’s countenance, too clever even behind Coke-bottle glasses. The ohaguro-bettari stood behind his shoulder, smiling, every tooth capped in ink, so close to his cheek that he had to feel her breath on his ear. A stench of vinegar and rust seeped everywhere, and I tried not to think about silk and white satin, so many yards of both, enough to bury a corpse six times over. “No. There is no fucking way I could be okay.”
