Posted by Verity on July 08, 2001 at 00:14:39:
--It's amazing, banal but amazing, how slow time goes when you're waiting. She read the ad for Snoop Dawg's album on the diamondvision screen across the street about sixhundred and sixty six times. Her heart raced every time somebody pulled over and asked her if she wanted a date. But even bored she was observant and when the silver Spyder had cruised by her several times, her pulse accelerated even more. Finally the car stopped, the door opened, and with no preamble an average voice confidently said "Lilith. Get in."
She'd planned a whole little scenario, a long look, "You're not a cop are you," scoping him out, all of it, but that didn't last.
She
did
it.
She got in.
Deep breath, deep breath…she didn't even really dare look at the man yet. She was at least sure this was just one man. Because Spyders don't have backseats. -Clever Jane, gee, some of those higher brain functions are still working.-
You don't really drive on Sunset, you do a long succession of parking jobs. He'd been heading west, the direction everyone who talks about Sunset says is "towards the ocean"; and it certainly is between 3 and 5 in the morning. The rest of the time it would take so much time to get to the ocean that way you'd be better off getting on the freeway going the other way and just heading for some beach in the Carolinas. But he turned up some very small, very steep street that moved even further into the hills, and made a few turns after that, and pretty soon she could tell by the moon (the total eclipse by the neon now having ended) that they were heading east. He didn't say anything or do anything except handle the standard-transmission car, but then on these curves that was plenty, she most distinctly did not want to die hitting the stop sign at Mulholland.
She'd been avoiding looking at him, and besides on Sunset if she'd looked at him he would have been a constantly changing kaleidoscope of color and shading, and she would have seen just about nothing. Now here, even in the darkness she could get a little more information. His hair seemed light, but grey or blond she couldn't tell. His face was slim and the moonlight on the slim planes of his face made her think about that old poem about "the skull beneath the skin." He had a bit of the Eurotrash look to him; his suit was light-colored and lacked a collar, his hair was very short without looking low-maintenance. She wouldn't have been surprised if when he spoke again she heard a trace of an accent.
But she didn't. The voice was gravelly, as if he'd smoked a lot of cigarettes; she thought a little of that tape of that guy from the Natural Born Killer soundtrack, that old, hip guy who'd known Dylan or something. "Is it still Lilith now?" he asked. He still didn't glance at her and considering the next curve, no surprise there.
She managed to avoid a stupid laugh and said "No, not much point now, it's Jane."
"Plain Jane who isn't, then. I haven't seen a picture on the net or in the ones you sent me that did you anything like justice Jane." She smiled the standard smile for that sentence but her "thank you" was cut off. "I'm not Mack, either. I'm Darien." He grinned and his teeth glinted in the lights from the oncoming car. "It seems the exotic name factor has switched places."
She laughed for real, the kind that relieves tension, and she liked that fine. He told her to please herself with the music and she reached for the radio buttons and clicked the jazz he was playing to a station she wanted to hear, Beck and Artificial Joy Club doing "Sick and Beautiful". The streets were so narrow here that had they met someone they would have had to back up, and then she was looking across a street at an old ruin she recognized as the Houdini mansion, so she knew they were on Laurel Canyon and then suddenly they were turning up another itty-bitty street and into a steep driveway and she guessed they were home. Something about the way he left the car so quickly told her to stay and wait for the door to be opened for her, and it was. The warm wind washed over her with the strong scent of greenery that one caught only up here in the hills.
There wasn't a garage, and the stairs up past the expensively-lit and exquisitely faux-wild vegetation were old stone. She knew the garden wasn't really wild because it was green; this time of the year the hills looked like gold crushed velvet and would burn with the slightest spark. The winds were mild tonight; on another night those winds would make the threat of fire so great that people who lived up here went on alert at the slightest taint of smoke in the air.
The house above looked cobbled-together but that was so normal to Jane, with her experience of these canyons, that she barely noticed; he let her in an old mahogany door with the wrought iron grill such doors usually had and into a room she realized she'd been picturing for so long in her fantasies that for a moment this one seemed all wrong to her, imperfect; it wasn't the one in her head. It only took her a moment, though, to realize that it was quite lovely.
Each wall was painted a different, vivid, but not primary color. Pumpkin-orange. Sea-of-Cortez blue. Pomegranate-red. And the furnishings, all off-white linen on extraordinarily dark wood. There wasn't much art on the walls, just stretched drum-heads of tribal and colorful design, but on the shelves, the tables, were creatures out of the dreams of exquisite madmen, cats with the eyes of crazy humans, frogs who could sit up and play poker, mermaids in black and red with skull faces who smiled in their exquisite death.
Jane knew enough to know that she was seeing the art of Mexico, but through a glass darkly. This man had collected the oddest works from the strangest places for her to see. She still had the arrogance of the young, everything in the world was all for her.
But for one such as her, she was more than a little right.
She threw her wrap on an off-white linen couch, the splash of peach making a whole new element here. Underneath, short black linen, clashing with the furnishings but setting off the girl so well that Darien took a long moment merely to gaze at her from the door. It was odd; maybe he'd found a way to see, to feel; in any case he didn't waste something like the sight of this blond child in black against all this color. Paintings have been made, and well, from far less.
She stood, looking around but clearly waiting her due, an invitation, an offering. He was happy to make it. She didn't know it but many girls had stood where she did; none, however, had shone like an angel against the parrot-green and cornstalk-gold. "May I bring you something, Jane? Something to drink?"
She turned, pretended annoyance, was too young to succeed. "You promised me something…" He neither nodded nor made a denial but from his amused smile she could tell that she'd get what she came for, eventually, after the niceties had been observed. He would keep every promise made to this exquisite creation. He wondered for a few moments at how something came to be, from the inside-out. She finally went on. "Yes, then, something to drink, please."
Ah. The sign of the young, not having chosen that signature drink that would indicate their own sophistication. He smiled widely and she, staring at a wall-hanging of green-and-gold cornstalks on a pale background, very slim and stretched on pale framing, didn't notice. "As you wish, lovely Jane, a drink."
In the tiny kitchen, cut down from the rest of the house to suit his needs, he poured a very expensive tequila, an anejo from Porfidio, and then reached into the refrigerator for a sangrita of his own making. It would taste to her first of tomato, very fresh, from his own garden out back in this warm season; then of some sort of tropical fruit; then of spices. His own additive, matching in colour but not in taste, would probably not attract her attention.
When he returned she'd found the cd player (he nearly laughed; these children couldn't live without a soundtrack, they weren't in the movie if the music weren't playing) and he set the clear container of red sangrita on the blue-tile table next to the skull-shaped ceramic decanter of tequila and then he sat on the couch himself, pulling an alpaca throw from behind it, all glowing night-blues and quetzal-greens in case she became cold.
Knowing what she was about to see he guessed she might.
She'd queued up a few cds and apparently either hadn't asked why he'd owned them or assumed, rightly for some creature like her, that it was for her pleasure. He had to admit that of all the exquisite creatures he'd hosted she'd surprised him most. There was the usual, Depeche Mode and Hole, Cake and Soul Coughing and Concrete Blonde and Siouxie. But there were others a little more odd for something so young and confident: The Who, Warren Zevon. Dear Gods, Al Stewart. Sneaker Pimps he could ignore, but there was an awful lot of Radiohead. Still he could handle it all, even the Garbage. It was the John Prine, the Johnny Cash and the Hank Williams that made him hide a grin. This one was so fucking young and so old. Sometimes he wondered, in the things he did, the things he saw and heard and felt, if there was truly a transmigration of souls. This child was one he could barely believe began in her mother's womb less than two decades ago.
But it wasn't her soul he was interested in this time; there might be another time of course but not now…
The girl settled tentatively on the cream silk settee and he pushed both her shawl and the throw towards her. He'd seen it before, she'd feel her emotions as chill and need them both. She had downed a shot of tequila in a way shameful for something so precious, but was willing to learn about the sangrita, and after that first sip of palate-cleansing spiciness the next shot was sipped, not slammed. He smiled and sat on the matching chair near her. He didn't want her crowded. Even at this stage he could arrange to get her out of here.
Although he hardly intended to. That velvet skin and silken hair…
Finally she'd drunk a little and her breathing seemed even. He risked speaking. "Well, dear Jane, you made a request, and are you ready for it to be granted?"
She stuck her chin out in the most charming way. "Yes, I require proof, complete proof that you will take my life when this is finished. Are you going to do that?"
He laughed loudly, possibly frightening her but unable to avoid it. "Let's start with the VCR, shall we, unplain Jane?"
He pressed a button on a control hidden in his hand and they were looking at a stone surface, with some sort of soft surface above it. It took a good number of seconds in this extreme closeup to understand that this was a stone table, an altar if one was so minded, and the softness was the skin of a girl.
Jane's eyes grew wide at what was already obvious, as the tape panned back and she saw. Her companion smiled, knowing that this was a vastly edited tape, after all, there was much more to show Jane this evening…
The blood had already begun to flow. The girl lay, face up, and a very black knife was laid almost sideways to her skin. Jane could see a pattern on the skin near the knife, but not quite make it out because of all the blood. Something bright in greens and blues. A thin cloth, body paint, a tattoo...
The girl's face was contorted, as if she were screaming, but there was no sound at all from the tape. The black blade looked almost uneven…suddenly Jane realized she was looking at a stone blade, not a metal one, and a blade that was slipping between the girl's skin and the flesh beneath. She was not being stabbed, nor teased with the blade.
No. The skin was being removed, whole, in one piece.
Oh fuck. She was being flayed.
Suddenly Jane felt ill, regretting her choice of cd, which right now was Stan Ridgeway, "Ring of Fire". Somehow she could feel what that girl was going through as the piece of skin on her lovely stomach was carefully, slowly, yes erotically cut from her body. Oh God to know that she would never grow that back, that this was final, that after this perhaps she could live a half-life but after agreeing…no, she'd die soon, very soon…Jane took another drink of tequila and realized she'd clutched the coverlet to her. This girl was having her tattooed skin peeled from her body for some purpose…oh shit…Jane had to look away, look up.
She saw the wall hanging, the parrot-tattooed-skin stretched on what she now knew was a bone frame, and just like a fucking heroine in a novel she flattened on the couch, barely able to think at all.
It wasn't moments before Darien was bending over her with water and sangrita, she knew because when she glanced to the rather small black television in the tropically-painted cupboard the girl's tattoo had still not been completely cut from her slim body. Jane impassively watched the girl's dark face, realizing that it was that skin tone that made the parrot she could see on the wall so very lovely. She'd been chosen for this, surely, and for her willingness…for Jane could see that the girl was not tied down, rather was holding hard onto the hands of unseen male companions, forcing herself not to interfere with the peeling of her own skin. She couldn't imagine how in the hell one could hold that perfectly still, that the knife wouldn't slip through the thin skin, but she could see no hint of haze in the girl's eyes when her face came into the shot, as it carefully recorded her reaction; she was not drugged, it seemed.
Darien must have touched a button because it all speeded up, soon the connective tissue behind the skin was being cut carefully, although with no less pain on the part of the subject given her expression. Soon after that Darien was helping Jane to sit and handing her a small shot of the tequila and talking to her.
"All right, Jane, you see what was done with her outer body, but she still deserves your attention. Now are you willing to-"
Jane nodded, her jaw set, her eyes like black holes, nothing wrong there but what had to be. She saw nothing wrong in all of this, she just understood that as stars are eaten by neutron stars despite the horror of all that information compacted into nothingness she needed to see this. And so become a kind of star herself.
She watched the stone knife, the first one, so sharp, turn from cutting along the line of the girl's flesh to plunging into it. She was unable to avoid crying out, and Darien turned the sound up from "Firestarter" to the cries of the girl as the flesh of her belly was pierced, deep, deeper until blood fairly flowed in a gush even around the plug of the blade from the last wound. Jane knew very well that with that blood loss it was only a few minutes…
And she understood so fucking well that it meant they could do the same to her if she would only let them.
Soon in the tape the girl, although she'd been seemingly dead the moment before, thrashed and writhed, grunting and screaming, for several moments in the body's agonal spasm, the last-ditch attempt to take the body out of danger and save it. Soon, though, her eyes were glassy and milky and gone and her wounds trickled rather than bled, and she didn't move much, except the occasional spasm from muscles acting independently. The pretty tattooed skin was gone and there was a vast hole underneath, in her belly, with an even deeper hole where the knife had plunged straight back to her aorta, exsanguinating her in mere moments.
Jane was usually rather proud of all her knowledge of how violent death and dying happened.
Jane sighed and had another drink of tequila and of sangrita.
For the few hours that it mattered Jane regretted her next statement, but by the same token she could see in Darien's face that it was expected and truly, could she have done any differently? But God, did that make her any less guilty?
She was leaning back against the lovely soft silk couch and drinking and talking. "Yes. Yes Darien. If you want that of me do it to me." There was a pause. Ah Gods fuck that pause. "But-"
"But what, Jane? What we will do to modify your body to our whims, and your own planned death, isn't enough?"
She sighed and motherfuck she knew her sigh was almost half fake. "No, that's perfect, but..Darien…special effects these days…"
She didn't even have a chance to say more.
"Right you are, Jane." He picked up a phone, pushed a button and said into the mouthpiece "Strephan, bring Margaret."
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And a girl was brought out by a rather small, pudgy man, one of the net-stalkers she had originally envisioned, not what she'd expect here. The girl was put right in front of her, so close they could have touched, although the girl was bound. She had frizzy brown hair, a rather pudgy, aging body, a lovely tattoo of a frog on her upper thigh, and a willing face. She glanced at Jane, her look a mixture of fear, curiosity and that envy Jane was so used to from the normal ones, the ones who weren't unattractive, but even in their best outfits and makeup couldn't approach her on her worst day.
The man Strephan pulled a knife from his pocket, the kind that flips and locks open, this one with a reddish-wood handle grooved for his fingers. He stood behind the girl, his body pressed against hers, one arm bracing her against her throat. With the other hand he took the knife and put it to Margaret's stomach. Margaret's eyes widened.
Darien's voice was silky soft. "Well Margaret, time for you to get your wish I think."
Suddenly Margaret didn't look scared…she looked indignant. "But I thought, Strephan said that you-"
Darien cut her off with little effort and looked at her amusedly. "What Strephan said and what are true may or may not be the same thing. But in this case; he told you your tattoo was beautiful?"
Margaret nodded.
"He was right, and I approved you based on the pictures, it is. He said we could grant you an erotic death, and take your tattoo, make it a work of art, treasured through the ages? That's true too. Now, anything you may have fantasized, being worshipped by thirteen black-clad acolytes, sex for days and days, all of that…well I'm afraid that's your fantasy, Margaret."
Margaret looked as ready to spit as her namesake might. "But-but-but that's not fair, you only brought me here last night and barely talked to me-you call this erotic-"
Darien smiled but patiently. He seemed to be trying very hard not to act scornfully to the girl. "I disagree, dear. You're naked, and you'll die here, with three people paying proper attention to your every move, your every gasp. The next in line, as it were, is watching you die for her own edification, and I'm sure it's erotic to her as well. Strephan."
Before Jane (or Margaret) could protest at all Strephan had plunged the knife deep in the girl's left side, very high, and twisted it, holding her tightly against him as she screamed. There was an almost clinical quality in the way Jane noted the amount of blood, the way it fountained over the strong hand and arm of the man holding the girl in his grasp. No movie had ever gotten that colour, that texture, that flow correct. No one seeing it in reality would mistake it for anything but what it was, blood, sangre, nothing else was that red, that thick, that pure.
Jane took one step forward and in all the hours she lived she could never have told anyone why. To save the girl (something impossible now)? To immerse her own hands, her body, her face in that flow before it so quickly came to an end? To put her face to Margaret's, to see her mouth move as she screamed and kiss it, take the screams in her own body, to watch her eyes and see if she could discern the moment when life left her?
She never knew because Darien stopped her with one very hard hand on her wrist. The hand, the control, combined with with the scene before her, simultaneously aroused her and brought her back to herself. She put her face to his, her chin getting that pugnacious look she'd learned from her white-shark-businessman father. "I have a right to see what I'm getting myself into, Sir." She pronounced precisely but with no false British note. "Let go of me now or consider the deal off."
He looked deep into her eyes and it was clear the thought flickered across his mind that he could tell her that no matter what, she'd never leave here alive. But these dramas were the essence of everything he was and he released her with some drama, his hand bringing hers to his mouth and kissing it. She hissed her impatience and moved to Margaret, a half a step.
Margaret, eyes showing her pain, scream trailing to a moan and body starting to slump against her captor, reached up one bloodstained hand and grasped Jane's hands in a parody of Darien's grip. For a moment, green eyes met brown and the now-dead saw the one soon-to-die.
Then Jane shook Margaret's hand off, impatiently, and reaching around the girl's breast, her taut nipple brushing her wrist, moved her fingers in along the blade and into the wound in Margaret's side.
Margaret's mouth couldn't possibly have opened any wider. She was screaming with no sound and her eyes, fixed on the other girls, ran betrayal/pleading/fury/despair like a quick loop reel on MTV. And Jane's eyes never changed a bit. She knew now, this was real (andwarmslickpulsingdyingsohothothot) and she forced herself with only the greatest difficulty to step back and move to Darien.
Then she wiped her bloody hand on his suit. "All right. I agree, but I want this to take more time than Margaret here."
He stared at her, expressionless, his body as tense as rigor mortis. When he spoke it was through clenched jaw. He was getting what he'd wanted so very much but at such a price to his pride, would it ever recover?
Fuck it, who cared. This piece the whole City would give anything at all for was his, his to mark, his to kill, his to memorialize forever. Pride his therapist could deal with. "As you wish, Jane. Many choices are still yours…you're not marked I believe?" She nodded once. "Then you'll need to decide what mark you want on your body and where, and I will leave that choice entirely up to you, although an artist can work with you if you wish. I hope, if you agree, to have you branded, scarified or, if you will, cut, and branded before the denouement."
She tilted her head to one side. Two feet from her a girl was being dragged off, dead or so close as made no difference, and while it hadn't seemed to affect her, it was clear she was no longer the child she'd been. "I agree." That pugnacious chin again." I want it special. I'm special, it has to be. It has to be the best, my mark, my death, what you make of it after, understand?"
Damn, his therapist would have something to deal with next week. Maybe move the appointment up and add some Valium. "Understood." He smirked. "Our girls who stay here longer than a day or two usually take new names. May I suggest one for you?"
Those full lips were as thin as they ever got. If she'd lived a long time, maybe it would have taken collagen to maintain that pout.
But then she never would.
"I agree, as long as I like the name. I'm not like her. No, I'm not like either of them." She didn't bother gesturing neither to either the body's feet disappearing around the corner nor to the tape of the body being cleared away on the TV.
He smiled with no irony and brushed her cheek with one thumb, letting it caress those full lips, that thrust-out chin, then up her knife-thin jawline past those cheekbones to run fingers through the cornsilk hair. "No, Jane, unplain Jane. You're not like either of them. In fact, I'll tell you now, you are like nothing, no one, I've ever had here under my control, no, nor like anyone I've seen the world round I didn't control." She couldn't help the faint smile, nor could he help kissing it. "No, your name will reflect what you truly are, precious, royal by virtue of your beauty and your sacrifice, although you may not understand it at first." He laughed. "Or be able to pronounce it."
She looked at him, a little confused. Blood was drying on her hand, on his suit, and she could feel it puckering, pulling. Without thought she put her marked hand between the two of them and licked at the clotted blood and he did the same until their tongues met. Finally, moaning very softly at the loss of his control (that bastard doctor best earn his pay….) he pulled back and held her by the shoulders. She looked drugged but still so completely in control. He looked at this perfect person…no…perfect…*thing*…and wondered if she'd ever been out of control from her cradle on. And wondered more importantly if she ever would.
"Here is your name. Chalchiuhxochitzin. Say it." She did, and he corrected her, over and over. She watched him, waiting for the meaning, knowing it would be given to her. "It means many things, but first, let me tell you that it means Lady Jade-Flower, in a language in which Jade is the most important thing in the world, and a flower the most emblematic of beauty and of death. Will that do for now?"
She tilted her head, that gesture that should seem theatrical and never did, and finally nodded once. "Chalchiuhxochitzin. I am Chalchiuhxochitzin." She laughed loudly, a little over the top and he realized that what she had seen, experienced today was a bit much for any seventeen-year-old, even one as in control as this one, and that she needed serious rest or she would shatter like a piece of the jadeite she was named after. "Such a strange thing, from such a plain name to one I can barely pronounce."
"You won't have to pronounce it really, ever again. You'll have to answer to it on occasion, but I think Lady Jade-Flower if there's ever cause for you to be, er, formally introduced, is fine. And more informally, you may merely use Jade-Flower. It's up to you."
Darien…" Formally introduced…answer to her new name…all at once it was too much for her. She swayed towards him, her hands on his body, mouth uptilted for a bloodstained kiss and he gripped her hard enough to hurt her, and kissed her with his teeth as much as his lips, then pushed her back, seeing more of her there in her eyes than there had been a moment ago.
He spoke. "Chalchiuhxochitzin, I want to give you a drug to help you sleep tonight but the choice of drug is yours." Her eyes narrowed just a touch that she didn't have a choice of 'drug' or 'no drug' but she was exhausted and not stupid. She knew she needed sleep and how hard it would be to hunt him down. She'd been, as so many insomniacs were, cursed by the Gods of sleep enough times to take help when it was offered. He continued. "I can give you opium, or opium with marijuana, to smoke. I can give you a pill, something pharmaceutical, anything you choose. You can leave it to a doctor-friend of mine to choose what's best. Or…or I can shoot you up with a little something."
He loved the way her lips curved at "a little something." Hell, he was halfway to loving all of her, such was her beauty and the way it had remade her. She laughed, rain on eucalyptus leaves. "I like the sound of that, 'a little something'. And maybe-" she leaned close to him, the blood and shock already making her drunk "-you'll do the needle yourself, a little foretaste?" Her voice was so soft, the enunciation so precise and yet charming, suddenly there was much more of lost Marilyn in her. "Would you-" her fingers trailed up his bloody lapel to his lips "--*penetrate* me Darien?"
He laughed lightly, admiringly, and took her arm. "Over and over, my precious flower, I swear. Over and over."
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