Borderlands Read online

  Michael is in his mid-thirties, married with three kids, and works part-time as a librarian in a small town in Vermont. He specifically asked that I not reveal the town’s name. Weird? Yeah, I thought so. When informed he would be part of this anthology, he wrote: “I hope everything goes smoothly with the book, and that by next year we’re still around to enjoy it.” Yo, Michael…my kind of guy.

  Harry hadn’t gone more than two miles before he spotted the girl. Slowing the van to match the speed of her bicycle, he took note of the bright green swimsuit, the long blonde ponytail, the limbs so bare in the afternoon sun.

  He accelerated for a moment and then abruptly pulled over to the curb. He shut off the engine, grabbed a prepared syringe from his kit, and quickly climbed out of the van. Standing on the sidewalk, Harry watched the girl approach.

  When she tried to escape by riding across the nearest lawn, he chased after her and knocked her to the ground. Holding her down firmly, he slipped the needle into her upper arm and depressed the plunger. As he waited for the child to lose consciousness, he spoke to her quietly. There were tiny chips of sky reflected in each of her frightened eyes. “Shhh…” he said. “Time to rest, honey. Time to rest.”

  Eventually, she slept.

  Harry lifted her in his arms and carried her back to the van. He slid open the door and placed her on the carpeted floor. Her small chest rose and fell steadily as he checked her pulse. Her pretty face was peaceful, unscarred by the world, without evidence of corruption or sin. Removing the handkerchief from his pants pocket, he dabbed at the fine thread of saliva leaking from the corner of her mouth.

  As he started the van, Harry congratulated himself on his good fortune. Often he had to search for an hour or more before locating such a suitable child. Considering how far behind schedule he was, finding this little girl so promptly had certainly been a stroke of luck.

  He drove out of town along the state highway. It was a thirty-minute ride to his next stop. He enjoyed working this part of the coast, where his assignments weren’t so close together. The land was still uncluttered here, still mostly unspoiled.

  Harry lit a cigarette and turned on the radio, looking for a ballgame. The girl moaned once, but softly—so softly that Harry almost didn’t hear.

  “Mr. Mack,” the manager greeted him. “How are you?”

  Harry glanced at the tag on her blouse. “Fine, May. Just fine.”

  “I spoke with the main office yesterday,” she said, “and they informed me that you would be arriving earlier this afternoon, before the evening rush.”

  “Well, May,” Harry replied, “something came up during the installation this morning. An unforeseen complication.”

  “Ah,” May answered. “I see.”

  They were standing just outside the building’s rear entrance. Off to the right, a steady stream of cars crept past the drive-through window, each vehicle pausing to receive a small white bag or two of food and a cardboard tray of assorted drinks.

  “Can I get you anything?” May asked. “Coffee? A Jolly Burger?”

  “Thank you, no. I’d better get started here and tend to our friend.”

  May smiled. “Very good, Mr. Mack. Then I’ll speak with you later.”

  Harry turned away. He walked across the parking lot and climbed into the back of the van. He handcuffed the still-sleeping girl to the rack of shelves bolted to the wall and then he gagged her. Beneath her head he placed the embroidered pillow that his wife had made for him on his last birthday. Near her hands he set the stuffed bear that some previous child had left behind. Then he grabbed the wire brush and half a dozen sheets of sandpaper from the topmost shelf, and stepped back outside.

  He wasn’t too surprised to discover that the play area was fairly crowded. Kids were going up and down both slides, climbing in and out of the giant Jolly Sandwich, and riding all three french-fry seesaws. Several others sat at the tables arranged along the front of the building, picking through the few remaining scraps of their children’s meals.

  Harry made his way toward the corner beyond the infants’ swing set. Once there, using the master key on his ring, he opened a small wrought iron gate and entered a fenced-off section of the playground, a space barely ten feet square. Just inside the gate, on a low brick pedestal, with his right arm upraised in a cheerful salute, stood Mr. Wally, the jolly clown.

  Harry thought he seemed to be in pretty poor shape, considering the fact that the last installation had been only six months ago. Mr. Wally’s grinning face was rusty in several places, especially near the lips and eyes, and every button on his suit was chipped. Also, the blue toes of his overlarge shoes were cracking badly. Harry estimated that the work would take at least an hour—first brushing and sanding, and then touching him up with some paint.

  “Mr. Wally,” Harry said, rolling up his sleeves. “With your permission, I’ll begin.”

  Exactly one hour later, he applied a final bit of purple to Mr. Wally’s lapel and stood back to admire his work. Even after fourteen years in this business, Harry still occasionally felt a certain swelling of pride in his chest when he successfully completed this portion of his duties.

  As he resealed the paint cans and gathered his brushes, Harry realized how late it had become. Except for five kids and two young women, the play area was now empty. The supper time rush was long over. The lights were on inside and the parking lot quiet. Harry looked west and saw that if he hoped to finish before sundown, he would have to hurry.

  The little girl was awake when he reached the van. Harry put all the paints away on the proper shelves and placed the brushes to soak in a jar of fresh turpentine. Then he retrieved his logbook from the front seat and removed the gag from the girl’s mouth.

  He asked her several times what her name was, and her age, but she refused to answer. And so, next to that day’s date in the ledger, right below the information he had entered concerning the morning job, Harry wrote: Name: ? Sex: F Age: 8(?) Place: Freeport. Installed: Haverhill. Comments:

  But he couldn’t think of anything to add right then, so he closed the book and turned back to the girl.

  “I’m going to give you something that will make you sleep,” he told her. He opened his kit, took out a syringe, and gave her a second shot.

  “Please don’t worry,” Harry said to her. He knelt beside her and wiped a tear from her cheek. Gently he touched her hair. “Everything’s okay, honey. Don’t worry.”

  When she was finally unconscious, he removed the handcuffs, spread the rubber sheet out on the carpet, and got to work.

  As he stripped off her swimsuit, he noted once again how truly beautiful she was. Carefully, he brushed away the few grains of sand that clung like powdered sugar to her belly. Then he began rubbing the scented oil onto her skin, until every part of her was slick and shiny, front and back.

  He took the pair of red W-shaped barrettes from her hair and put them in his pocket, thinking that his granddaughter might like to have them. As he shaved the girl’s head, he wondered how his wife was feeling, and he reminded himself to be sure to phone her as soon as he had finished here.

  Harry put the girl’s shorn tresses and her swimsuit in the large plastic bag that already held several days’ worth of clothes, shoes, and hair. Then he sat down beside her and lifted her head onto his lap. Now came the worst part, or so Harry often thought. He would have preferred to skip this step, but it was something that couldn’t be avoided.

  Starting with her lower left molars, using the hooked probe, he separated the gum from around each tooth. He worked rapidly and with considerable skill, tearing at the gum pockets until every root was at least partially exposed. Then, taking the curved elevator, he forced its point down between each root and the jawbone, twisting his wrist up and back until he felt something give. Using any one of three forceps—the universal, the hawk’s bill, or the cow horn—he would then simply dig deep with the instrument beaks, grip the roots, and pull.

  The work proceeded quickly. If
a tooth shattered, he just left the attached fragment in her mouth. He put all the extracted teeth together in a Mr. Wally SuperSize cup, and then spent a few minutes pressing at her gums with cotton swabs, stopping the worst of the bleeding—although baby teeth don’t bleed very much at all.

  Then came the painting of her face—the lopsided orange smile, the blue diamond tears, the big black circles around her eyes—a la Mr. Wally.

  Finally, she was ready. Harry found the camera and photographed her in the required poses, which was something new that the main office had just started.

  As he carried her across the play area, all the kids became still and the two remaining mothers fell silent. Standing directly in front of Mr. Wally, Harry waited a moment before speaking. The clown’s raised right hand seemed to be reaching out to arrest for an instant the actions of the entire world.

  “Mr. Wally,” Harry recited, “Thou art the savior of mankind. We live on thy breath, and we subsist on the flesh of thy body. Take this child, O Thriving One, into thy bosom. Accept this offering from thy humble servants.”

  He brought her around to the other side of the pedestal and set her on the ground. He also put down the Stryofoam cup that held her teeth. He inserted a key into Mr. Wally’s left shoulder, and the back half of the statue swung open.

  He picked the girl up again and stood her inside Mr. Wally, fastening several straps around her chest, waist, and thighs, until she was securely in place. Last of all he adjusted the neck brace, so that her face fit snugly against the inside surface of Mr. Wally’s face, her eyes peering out through his eyes, her mouth open inside his smile.

  “Daughter,” Harry said, “ye have eaten and drunk. Go forth, go forth.”

  He set the cup of teeth near her feet, and closed her in. The chaste maidens who tended the temple’s grills and perpetual fires would remove the girl’s body soon after she died.

  HIS MOUTH WILL TASTE OF WORMWOOD

  Poppy Z. Brite

  The award for the most intriguing name among Borderlands' contributors has go to Poppy Z. Brite. Born in 1967, Poppy writes with a maturity and control not often found in young writers. Her stories move and writhe in silky, snakelike rhythms, embodied with a dark sensuality, loathsome yet attractive. She has appeared in Silva 's The Horror Show and Ptacek's Women of Darkness II, and she has recently completed her first novel.

  Currently living in Athens, Georgia, Poppy has spent her time not writing as a candy maker, short-order cook, an artist's model, and an exotic dancer. Among her interests, she lists Siamese Cats, American cars of the forties through the sixties, and burial customs of different cultures. Somehow,I get the feeling this lady's not exactly your basic girl next door.

  "To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave," said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.

  "To the funeral lilies," I replied, "and to the calm pale bones." I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe cauterized my throat with its flavor, part pepper, part licorice, part rot. It had been one of our greatest finds: more than fifty bottles of the now-outlawed liqueur, sealed up in a New Orleans family tomb. Transporting them was a nuisance, but once we had learned to enjoy the taste of wormwood, our continued drunkenness was ensured for a long, long time. We had taken the skull of the crypt's patriarch, too, and it now resided in a velvet-lined enclave in our museum.

  Louis and I, you see, were dreamers of a dark and restless sort. We met in our second year of college and quickly found that we shared one vital trait: both of us were dissatisfied with everything. We drank straight whiskey and declared it too weak We took strange drugs, but the visions they brought us were of emptiness, mindlessness, slow decay. The books we read were dull; the artists who sold their colorful drawings on the street were mere hacks in our eyes; the music we heard was never loud enough, never harsh enough to stir us. We were truly jaded, we told one another. For all the impression the world made upon us, our eyes might have been dead black holes in our heads.

  For a time we thought our salvation lay in the sorcery wrought by music. We studied recordings of weird nameless dissonances, attended performances of obscure bands at ill-lit filthy clubs. But music did not save us. For a time we distracted ourselves with carnality. We explored the damp alien territory between the legs of any girl who would have us, sometimes separately, sometimes both of us in bed together with one girl or more. We bound their wrists and ankles with black lace, we lubricated and penetrated their every orifice, we shamed them with their own pleasures. I recall a mauve-haired beauty, Felicia, who was brought to wild sobbing orgasm by the rough tongue of a stray dog we trapped. We watched her from across the room, drug dazed and unstirred.

  When we had exhausted the possibilities of women we sought those of our own sex, craving the androgynous curve of a boy's cheekbone, the molten flood of ejaculation invading our mouths. Eventually we turned to one another, seeking the thresholds of pain and ecstasy no one else had been able to help us attain. Louis asked me to grow my nails long and file them into needle-sharp points. When I raked them down his back, tiny beads of blood welled up in the angry tracks they left. He loved to lie still, pretending to submit to me, as I licked the salty blood away. Afterward he would push me down and attack me with his mouth, his tongue seeming to sear a trail of liquid fire into my skin.

  But sex did not save us either. We shut ourselves in our room and saw no one for days on end. At last we withdrew to the seclusion of Louis's ancestral home near Baton Rouge. Both his parents were dead–a suicide pact, Louis hinted, or perhaps a murder and a suicide. Louis, the only child, retained the family home and fortune. Built on the edge of a vast swamp, the plantation house loomed sepulchrally out of the gloom that surrounded it always, even in the middle of a summer afternoon. Oaks of primordial hugeness grew in a canopy over the house, their branches like black arms fraught with Spanish moss. The moss was everywhere, reminding me of brittle gray hair, stirring wraithlike in the dank breeze from the swamp. I had the impression that, left too long unchecked, the moss might begin to grow from the ornate window frames and fluted columns of the house itself.

  The place was deserted save for us. The air was heady with the luminous scent of magnolias and the fetor of swamp gas. At night we sat on the veranda and sipped bottles of wine from the family cellar, gazing through an increasingly alcoholic mist at the will-o'-the-wisps that beckoned far off in the swamp. Obsessively we talked of new thrills and how we might get them. Louis's wit sparkled liveliest when he was bored, and on the night he first mentioned grave robbing, I laughed. I could not imagine that he was serious.

  "What would we do with a bunch of dried-up old remains? Grind them to make a voodoo potion? I preferred your idea of increasing our tolerance to various poisons."

  Louis' sharp face snapped toward me. His eyes were painfully sensitive to light, so that even in this gloaming he wore tinted glasses and it was impossible to see his expression. He kept his fair hair clipped very short, so that it stood up in crazy tufts when he raked a nervous hand through it. "No, Howard. Think of it: our own collection of death. A catalog of pain, of human frailty–all for us. Set against a backdrop of tranquil loveliness. Think what it would be to walk through such a place, meditating, reflecting upon your own ephemeral essence. Think of making love in a charnel house! We have only to assemble the parts–they will create a whole into which we may fall."

  (Louis enjoyed speaking in cryptic puns; anagrams and palindromes, too, and any sort of puzzle appealed to him. I wonder whether that was not the root of his determination to look into the fathomless eye of death and master it. Perhaps he saw the mortality of the flesh as a gigantic jigsaw or crossword which, if he fitted all the parts into place, he might solve and thus defeat. Louis would have loved to live forever, though he would never have known what to do with all his time.)

  He soon produced his hashish pipe to sweeten the taste of the wine, and we spoke no more of grave robbing that night. But the thought preyed upon
me in the languorous weeks to come. The smell of a freshly opened grave, I thought, must in its way be as intoxicating as the perfume of the swamp or a girl's most intimate sweat. Could we truly assemble a collection of the grave's treasures that would be lovely to look upon, that would soothe our fevered souls?

  The caresses of Louis' tongue grew languid. Sometimes, instead of nestling with me between the black satin sheets of our bed, he would sleep on a torn blanket in one of the underground rooms. These had originally been built for indeterminate but always intriguing purposes–abolitionist meetings had taken place there, Louis told me, and a weekend of free love, and an earnest but wildly incompetent Black Mass replete with a vestal virgin and phallic candles.

  These rooms were where our museum would be set up. At last I came to agree with Louis that only the plundering of graves might cure us of the most stifling ennui we had yet suffered. I could not bear to watch his tormented sleep, the pallor of his hollow cheeks, the delicate bruise-like darkening of the skin beneath his flickering eyes. Besides, the notion of grave robbing had begun to entice me. In ultimate corruption might we not find the path to ultimate salvation?

  Our first grisly prize was the head of Louis' mother, rotten as a pumpkin forgotten on the vine, half shattered by two bullets from an antique Civil War revolver. We took it from the family crypt by the light of a full moon. The will-o'-the-wisps glowed weakly, like dying beacons on some unattainable shore, as we crept back to the manse. I dragged pick and shovel behind me; Louis carried the putrescent trophy tucked beneath his arm. After we had descended into the museum, I lit three candles scented with the russet spices of autumn (the season when Louis's parents had died), while Louis placed the head in the alcove we had prepared for it. I thought I detected a certain tenderness in his manner. "May she give us the family blessing," he murmured, absently wiping on the lapel of his jacket a few shreds of pulpy flesh that had adhered to his fingers.