Wounds, page 20
part #2 of Voice of Blood Series
“You didn’t have to do that,” Daniel said, kissing her forehead. “I can kill people all by myself.”
“I wanted to,” she said. “I’m glad it helped you, but that wasn’t it.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“I saw her face,” she said. “Sonic Ruth’s. Instead of his. Made it easier. I could kill her over and over again and not feel anything.”
Her body swelled and warmed for a second, shivering, then relaxed and collapsed back in on itself. “This place is perfect. We’re going to die here,” she murmured sleepily.
Daniel laughed faintly. “We aren’t going to die here,” he said. “We’re not going to die. I’m not, anyway.”
Her eyes opened a fraction, then closed again. “You’re not going to die at all,” she said.
“No, I’m not going to die at all,” he agreed.
Scene Eighteen: The Beautiful Warehouse That Burned
Daniel woke to a strong smell of butane and Sybil’s astonished face, ten inches away from his eyes. He stretched stiffly for a moment before he realized with a shock what she had been looking at. She had seen him asleep, withered and hideous; she had seen his flesh become sentient again, going back to the same features as on the day he ceased to be human, one cell at a time perfectly recalling an April night in 1930. Something like a genuine miracle. He sprung to the opposite end of the moth-eaten chaise longue from where she sat, facing him on the floor, and now shaking her head.
“Oh, my God. I can’t believe it,” she said. “You came back to life. I watched you come back to life. ’Cos, dude, you were dead. I would swear it. I mean . . .”
Pain gnashed his foot, first dully, then with a stabbing, tearing intensity. He brought it out from underneath him to find his left-most toe missing, and a spurting stump in its place, twitching as the muscles of his foot tried to wiggle flesh that was no longer there. He stared up accusingly at Sybil. She shrugged.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I did that at least an hour ago. You didn’t breathe, you didn’t move. . . . You didn’t even bleed.” She stared interestedly at the wound. “Is your blood really black”
Daniel applied pressure, clasping both hands around the end of his foot. Immediately the cascade of blood stopped. “Great; now I can’t walk for hours,” he grumbled, secretly grateful that she had stopped with a toe.
He had set his sweater aside, draping it over a chair to dry before falling asleep, he remembered that; but where had the sweater gone? He could handle cold without ill effects, but that didn’t mean he liked being cold. All the heat in his body seemed to be concentrated in the phantom where his toe was supposed to be, all but sizzling as blood rushed to it and grew upon itself. He felt the thick slimy clot wriggling between his palms.
Sybil went on, cheerful and oblivious. “That’s fine. We’re fine in here. You don’t have to go anywhere. The snow is getting totally deep, but there’s almost no wind coming in. We get some space heaters up in this shit, we are set.”
Daniel glanced around him at the blanketing gloom, then risked a glance at his watch. It was three in the afternoon, though by the light, it might have been three in the morning. “Set for what?” he demanded. “Are you abandoning the studio so soon? And I thought you were so comfortable there.”
Sybil stood up and put her hands on her hips. She wore a different set of leggings—white and thickly woven. “Why do you even pretend to understand me? The studio is good in that I don’t feel like I’m going to get shot and I can work there, but this is—this is a place.” She went to the railing of the stairs leading down to the ground level and leaned over it like a long movie cruise-ship farewell, one booted foot held daintily off the floor. “We can work on this without distractions.”
“We?” said Daniel.
“Yeah, we,” she said, looking over her shoulder. The daintily raised combat boot flopped back onto the floor with a faint puff of dust. “You’re inspiration. You’re subject.” She gazed back down at her repulsive palace. “You come back from the dead.”
“I do it every day,” said Daniel.
She put her head between her hands, crushing her snowflake hair. “You don’t know how amazing that is. You’ve totally forgotten.”
Daniel, putting his weight on his right foot, half-hopped, half-hobbled over to her. “I can buy it, I suppose,” he mused, taking one of her wrists in his blood-blackened hand.
“Nobody can know,” she said to the room. She turned toward him and kissed the corners of his mouth, her eyes mostly closed and dreamy. “Secret. Like everything. It’s easier.”
“Easier for you, maybe,” he said. He changed the kiss.
“Sorry about your toe,” she said. “I’ve got it around here somewhere—can you maybe just stick it back on?”
“I have to grow a new one. Sorry. But thanks.” The scent of her unwashed ears generated something within him that made the pain melt away.
“You grow new ones? Like a lizard?!”
“Sort of like,” he said.
“Sweet! Can I cut off your head?”
“I’m fairly sure that kills the patient.”
She arched her eyebrow at him, then spun away from him down the crumbling concrete steps, some of them still showing traces of blackened linoleum. “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful warehouse, full of hopes and dreams and money.” Her voice rose up as she descended. “A lady with cat-eye glasses answered the newfangled telephone machine, and big tough guys named . . . urn . . . lett and Rhett and Vinnie . . . moved furniture in and out, in and out, every day except for Sunday, and on Sunday, Vinnie and the lady with the cat-eye glasses come to the beautiful warehouse to fuck each other, because they’re married to other people. The lady likes the guy named Vinnie because he reminds her of her father. The little girl sits on Daddy’s lap and he gives her a little ride.” At the landing at the base of the stairs, she turned back to Daniel and smiled. “And every time, after they fuck, they share a cigarette. Because it’s traditional—no, ritualistic. And one day . . . they fall asleep.”
To one side of the room rested a pile made up of Daniel’s boots, his sweater, Sybil’s gloves, and the velour leggings, glinting attractively from underneath. Sybil approached the pile and lit a match. “And the place goes up,” she declared, flinging the match and covering her face with the other arm.
The pile ruptured into flames, but not as violently as Daniel had expected, watching her hide her eyes like that. He couldn’t imagine that a blaze existed that Sybil wouldn’t stare full into. She staggered back and crowed happily, clapped her hands, pumped her fist in the air.
“Why are you burning my sweater?” Daniel asked.
“It’s bloody,” she called up. “Your boots are bloody. My legs got bloody. I’m burning the shit. I bring a bottle of butane with me everywhere I go, just in case I need to set something on fire. Y’know, get rid of it. Permanently.”
“Oh, suddenly you’ve got the instincts of a seasoned killer.” Daniel rested back on the chaise, holding his foot above the level of his heart. Already the toe was closing up and itching as new skin cells remembered themselves into being. “Perhaps you should have thought of that before slitting a man’s throat in an alley.”
Sybil stomped back to the second level, her cheeks almost orange with fury. “What the fuck are you talking about? What other way to kill is there?”
Daniel sighed. “Subtlety,” he said. “Subtlety, my child. It saves a lot of time.”
“Don’t fucking call me your child, I’m not anybody’s child. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine.”
“Do you particularly want to go to jail?” he asked. “You’re heading there at a breakneck pace, liebschen.”
“And how do you stay out of trouble? And just how would you have handled last night?”
“I stay out of trouble by confusing people’s minds,” Daniel said. “I encourage them to forget. My secret super powers, remember? And if I’m going to kill someone and make a mess, I do it someplace where I can damned well wash up afterwards. I can’t go losing sweaters every single night just because it’s too much trouble to get a fucking room.”
He paused and winced as the new, stiff toe-phalange cut through the thin tissues still growing over it. How can such a tiny bone cause so much pain? “Ow, Jesus fuck—Sybil, this is too dangerous. I don’t want either one of us to get caught.”
“Then why’d you toss Andrew in the Dumpster?” she countered. “You know they’ll find him.”
Daniel paused for a moment to compose his thoughts. “It was the only thing to do, in that situation,” he said. “With his throat cut, he’d be terribly messy and obvious to move.”
“But would you?” Downstairs, the fire spat, perhaps a button snapping. The flames gave off a wretched smell of cooking leather and melting acrylic. “Would you have moved the body, if you could?” When Sybil stood closer, her legs at eye level with Daniel and backlit by the fire-glow, he could see that what he had thought to be white leggings were, in reality, long-john underwear. They held the scent of her genitals, the sweat from her pubis, the faint tang of moisture from her vagina itself. Daniel closed his eyes and opened his mouth, to improve his smell by tasting the air along with it.
“Yes, I would have moved him,” he said softly. “I would have found him somewhere else, farther away. I wouldn’t have done him in public; I would have followed him home, which was my original plan, and told him a little good-night bedtime story and sent him off to sleep. Then again, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m sick of being wise and discreet.”
“This neighborhood gives me a feeling like corpses,” said Sybil. “Probably because I’ve left so many here.”
“What, all two of them?”
She laughed dismissively out of the side of her mouth.
“I brought a body to this neighborhood,” he continued, relaxing completely so that his blood, his energy, would be used making that toe. “The first night I ever saw you.”
Sybil blinked. “Really?”
“She was a whore. Remember Angelika? Or maybe Jane?”
“Oh . . . so that’s what happened to her. She was so annoying.”
“It was an accident. If she hadn’t been so stupid, she’d still be alive.”
“What did she do?”
“She bit me,” said Daniel, not without some satisfaction, only compounded by the way Sybil dropped her eyes to the ground and shuffled her boots. “So when can we get out of here?”
“You want to walk it? Snow’s about eighteen inches deep and I bet there’s ice under that.”
Daniel frowned.
“I didn’t think so. So in that case, we wait for the snow-plows. I heard them a couple of streets over a little while ago. Once they’ve gone past here, I say you use that precious little cell phone of yours and call us a taxi. Have the taxi meet me outside the subway station. I come over here and pick you up on the next block over—sorry, but you will have to walk that far.”
“Can’t it wait? Right now the flesh on it is like jelly.”
“All right, I’ll take the taxi to the studio. I get out of the taxi, then get another taxi to come and get you.”
Daniel sighed.
“Look, I have some spare socks you can have. If you’re careful, nobody will even notice you don’t have any shoes on.” She shook a plump black ball out of a pocket of her coat and shook out two approximations of human feet. He slid one sock on to his right foot, and it left a centimeter of white skin visible at his leather hem. “Or,” Sybil pointed out, bisecting another of his sighs, “you can just stay here and feel crappy until the sun goes nova. I know you really want a bath and to shave your legs or whatever. But I have to get back to the studio so I can get all my stuff.”
“You’re serious about living here?”
“I have never been so serious in all my life,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?”
He tried to lift his head, but with half the blood in his body down below his left ankle, it was just too much effort. “I’m sorry—all I feel right now is how much my foot hurts. Please don’t cut off any more toes or fingers, and don’t stab me, or stake me—it doesn’t kill me; all it does is either make me angry or make me whine. I just got staked not too long ago . . .”
“No shit! When?”
“In Portland.”
“For real? You ran into vampire hunters?”
Daniel smiled. “It’s a really long story,” he said.
She fluttered her eyelashes, coming across less as a femme fatale than someone in the grip of a mild epileptic seizure, and licked her smiling lips. “Well, I don’t hear the snowplows yet.” She came back and straddled him where he lay, gently gripping his waist with her thighs. “Get telling, Niner.”
Scene Nineteen: Curiosity/Jealousy
Daniel got back to his flat in a taxi, had a bath, and shaved his legs. His toe grew back, albeit stunted and sore and without the thick curved claw that ended every other one. A twenty-seven-year-old dot-com delivery service boy died of a stroke, slumped over the steering wheel of his van on his way back to the shipping warehouse. Daniel sent six more home with nothing more than a general sensation of light-headedness, which might have been attributed to the wicked joints with which Mr. Blum tipped. He was a popular customer.
The car hadn’t been damaged by police or criminals any more than a few head-sized dents and scratches on the paint job; if there had been bloodshed, the snow hid or washed it away.
Jackie Cundera called from Portland to tell him about the opening of the show. Mostly she gushed about the Japanese man’s installations—walk-in freezers full of beaded mannequins—but when he asked if any of his pieces had sold, she gently reminded him that the show would be going on until February. “Portland art consumers are a cautious bunch,” she said. “It’s like they comparison-shop . . . they come in and look, and only later do they make the investment. You could always consider lowering your prices.”
Sybil and the assistants finished the evil jungle gym and then threw a party underneath it, the club kids and art queens gathered in a throbbing, shouting mass. Daniel watched impassively from one end of the room, and Sybil the other. At some point in the evening, someone tried to light a pipe and caught the nearest canvas triangle, heavy with tempera and oil, aflame. Instantly, the bobbing of dancing and conversation became the boiling of panic; the drunk people forgot which end you could crawl out of and crushed themselves away from the smoker and his flaming arm and collar. Joachim, dashing out of the bathroom with his baggy pants falling around his knees, fumbled with a chemical fire extinguisher; after five precious seconds of struggle, he ejaculated a thick white plume of anti-incendiary powder over the fire and metal tubes and coruscating disco lights and sparkling, shrieking disco people. As the chaos cooled itself, you could hear Sybil bellowing laughter, galloping down the stairs.
After that, Daniel’s assistants couldn’t get Sybil out of the studio fast enough.
Two evenings after the party, Daniel climbed out of a taxi in front of a chic little créperie a few blocks away from the newly adopted warehouse. The restaurant stood in polished incongruity in the general desolation of this little slice of Brooklyn, locally known as DUMBO (its absurdly twee name an anagram of its geophysical being, Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass). DUMBO could be called a “neighborhood,” but that word implies the presence of neighbors, humanity strangely lacking in this colorless, industrial-warehouse limbo. The créperie’s only tidy new companion, a brilliantly gleaming bank tower with an emerald-green clock at its apex, rose inappropriately a few blocks of mangled concrete away. The fact that the clock was always on time dismayed Daniel. The time of day had no place here; it should be stuck in an imaginary time, always 4:12 perhaps, a slomo landscape under the unseeing Cyclops eye of a senile colossus who has forgotten how or what to count.
Daniel had to admit that this part of New York was suited to him. A large part of why he loved Hollywood so much was its atmosphere of decay, how the wind scoured the bones of dreams, how there was just nobody around. DUMBO felt the same, only far more intensely. Ten streets away, or four thousand feet across the river, hundreds of groceries, delicatessens, movie theaters, and shoe shops brought New York’s mass of humanity again, but here (even the créperie seemed a very realistic painting of an empty restaurant with the waitresses sprawled napping), he heard only his own footsteps.
This impression increased as he approached the warehouse. Nothing had been touched, it seemed, since the snowplows went through a week earlier. Hard ravines of sooty, gravel-choked solid-frozen snow grew on every street and peaked into plowed drifts at Daniel’s eye level. At the warehouse, dark footprints danced around the rutted tracks of a shopping cart.
Daniel knocked on the locked door. A liquid rustling came from inside, and the mailbox lid lifted a few inches. A scarred white hand, with a pistol gripped in its fingers, thrust out. “Go the fuck away.” A white thumb with paint-stained, stunted nail cocked the hammer.
“Go ahead and shoot,” Daniel grunted impatiently. “It’s cold out here.”
The hand and gun withdrew, and through the mailbox slit Daniel saw a strip of dirty face and two suspicious gray eyes. “Coast clear?”
“There’s nobody.”
The dead bolt screeched, and the door opened a crack.
Daniel slid inside, catching a curtain of heavy black polyvinyl tarp on his shoulder. He shut and locked the door behind him. “So how am I supposed to get in when you’re not here? Are there keys?” Daniel called, lifting the tarp over his head. “You should make a peephole in the—God in heaven, Sybil!”
The smell of burning plastic remained but had been joined by a miasma of different kinds of incense—frankincense bullying the others onto the edges of his perception. Most of the ruined furniture from the upper level, cushions ripped off, had been moved down to the ground floor. In the middle of the warehouse floor, two long tables formed a V. The chair frames, arranged in a semicircle around the twisted studio lamp with the 200-watt bulb, served as easels for a score of canvases in various stages of completion, but fairly well sketched out in charcoal or pastel or crayon. The broken window had been covered with more black polyvinyl, nailed tightly in place. All the broken glass and chunks of burnt and ripped wood had been swept into a terrible pile against the wall under the window where he’d first entered, just out of reach of a glowing industrial space heater, looming behind a ratty old box fan. A massive boom box played frenetic punk music. Dozens of lit, scented candles addled Daniel’s senses even more. Sybil walked around the edges of her palace, dressed in baggy olive-drab cutoffs that came past her knees, white long underwear, and several layers of sweatshirts, swinging a brass censer foaming with heavy, funereal smoke.
