Alabaster: Pale Horse, page 2
“You from Vidalia?” the Bailiff asks, and the girl nods her head, but doesn’t say anything. Dead Girl closes her bookCharlotte’s Web in Latin, Tela Charlottaeand lays it on the seat between them. The albino smells like old sweat and dirty clothes, like fresh air and the warm blood in her veins. Bobby turns around in his seat and watches her with curious silver eyes.
“What’s her name?” he asks Dead Girl, and the Bailiff swerves to miss something lying in the road.
“Dancy,” the albino says. “Dancy Flammarion,” and she takes off her sunglasses, reveals eyes the deep red-pink of pyrope or the pulpy hearts of fresh strawberries.
“Is she blind?” Bobby asks, and “How the hell would I know?” Dead Girl grumbles. “Ask her yourself.”
“Are you blind?”
“No,” Dancy tells him, the hard edge in her voice to say she knows this is a game, a taunting formality, and maybe she’s seen it all before. “But the light hurts my eyes.”
“Mine, too,” Bobby says.
“Oculocutaneous albinism,” the Bailiff chimes in. “A genetic defect in the body’s ability to convert the amino acid tyrosine into melanin. Ah, but we’re being rude, Bobby. She probably doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“No, that’s all right. It doesn’t bother me,” and Dancy leans suddenly, boldly, forward, leaving only inches between herself and Bobby. The movement surprises him, and he jumps. “What about you, Bobby? What’s wrong with your eyes?” Dancy asks him.
“I” he begins and then pauses and looks uncertainly at Dead Girl and the Bailiff. Dead Girl shrugs, no idea what the rules in this charade might be, and the Bailiff keeps his eyes on the road.
“That’s okay,” Dancy says, and she winks at him. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, if you’re not supposed to tell. The angel tells me what I need to know.”
“You have an angel?” and now Bobby sounds skeptical.
“Everyone has an angel. Well, everyone I ever met so far. Even you, Bobby. Didn’t they tell you that?”
Dead Girl sighs and picks her book up again, opens it to a page she’s read twice already.
“Why don’t you see if you can find something on the radio,” she says to Bobby.
“But I’m still talking to Dancy.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to talk to Dancy, boy,” the Bailiff says. “She isn’t going anywhere.”
“She’s going to Savannah with us.”
“Except Savannah,” Dancy says very softly, faint smile at the corners of her mouth, and she turns away and looks out the window at the night-shrouded fields and farmhouses rushing silently past. Bobby stares at her for another minute or two, like he’s afraid she might disappear, then he goes back to playing with the radio knobs.
“You too, Mercy Brown,” the albino whispers, and Dead Girl stops reading.
“What?” she asks. “What did you just say to me?”
“I dreamed about you once, Mercy. I dreamed about you sleeping at the bottom of a cold river, crabs tangled in your hair and this boy in your arms.” Dancy keeps her eyes on the window as she talks, her voice so cool, so unafraid, like maybe she climbs into cars with demons every goddamn night of the week.
“I dreamed about you and snow. You got an angel, too.”
“You shut the fuck up,” Dead Girl snarls. “That’s not my name, and I don’t care who you are, you shut up or”
“You’ll kill me anyway,” Dancy says calmly, “so what’s the difference?” and up front the Bailiff chuckles to himself. Bobby finds a station playing an old Johnny Cash song, “The Reverend Mr. Black,” and he sings along.
Southeast and the land turns from open prairie and piney woods to salt marsh and estuaries, confluence of muddy, winding rivers, blackwater piss of the distant Appalachians, the Piedmont hills, and everything between. The low country, no fayrer or fytter place, all cordgrass and wax myrtle, herons and crayfish, and the old city laid out wide and flat where the Savannah River runs finally into the patient, hungry sea. The end of Sherman’s March, and this swampy gem spared the Yankee torches, saved by gracious women and their soirée seductions, and in 1864 the whole city made a grand Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln.
The mansion on East Hall Street, Stephens Ward, built seventeen long years later, Reconstruction days, and Mr. Theodosius W. Ybanes hired a fashionable architect from Rhode Island to design his eclectic, mismatched palace of masonry and wrought iron, Gothic pilasters and high Italianate balconies. The mansard roof tacked on following a hurricane in 1888 and, after Theodosius’s death, the house handed down to his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, generations come and gone and, unlike most of Savannah’s stately old homes, this house has never passed from the direct bloodline of its first master.
And, at last, delivered across the decades, a furious red century and decades more, into the small, slender hands of Miss Aramat Drawdes, great-great-great-granddaughter of a Civil War munitions merchant and unspoken matriarch of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists. The first female descendant of Old Ybanes not to take a husband, her sexual, social, and culinary proclivities entirely too unorthodox to permit even a marriage of convenience, but Miss Aramat keeps her own sort of family in the rambling mansion on East Hall Street. Behind yellow, glazed-brick walls, azaleas and ivy, windows blinded by heavy drapes, the house keeps its own counsel, its own world apart from the prosaic customs and concerns of the city.
And from appearances, this particular night in June is nothing special, not like the time they found the transsexual junkie who’d hung herself with baling wire in Forsyth Park, or last October, when Candida had the idea of carving all their jack-o’-lanterns from human and ape skulls and then setting them out on the porches in plain sight. Nothing so unusual or extravagant, only the traditional Saturday night indulgences: the nine Ladies of the League and Society (nine now, but there have been more and less, at other times), assembled in the Yellow Room. Antique velvet wallpaper the pungent color of saffron, and they sit, or stand, or lie outstretched on the Turkish carpet, the cushions strewn about the floor and a couple of threadbare recamiers. Miss Aramat and her eight exquisite sisters, the nine who would be proper ghouls if only they’d been born to better skins than these fallible, ephemeral husks. They paint their lips like open wounds, their eyes like bruises. Their fine dresses are not reproductions, every gown and corset and crinoline vintage Victorian or Edwardian, and never anything later than 1914, because that’s the year the world ended, Miss Aramat says.
A lump of sticky black opium in the tall, octopean hookah and there are bottles of burgundy, pear brandy, chartreuse, and cognac, but tonight Miss Aramat prefers the bitter Spanish absinthe, and she watches lazily as Isolde balances a slotted silver trowel on the rim of her glass. A single sugar cube, and the girl pours water from a carafe over the trowel, dissolving the sugar, drip, drip, drip, and the liqueur turns the milky green of polished jade.
“Me next,” Emily demands from her seat on one of the yellow recamiers, but Isolde ignores her, pours herself an absinthe and sits on the floor at Miss Aramat’s bare feet. She smirks at Emily, who rolls her blue, exasperated eyes and reaches for the brandy, instead.
“Better watch yourself, Isolde,” Biancabella warns playfully from her place beneath a Tiffany floor lamp, stained-glass light like shattered sunflowers to spill across her face and shoulders. “One day we’re gonna have your carcass on the table.”
“In your dreams,” Isolde snaps back, but she nestles in deeper between Miss Aramat’s legs, anyway, takes refuge in the protective cocoon of her stockings and petticoat, the folds of her skirt.
Later, of course, there will be dinner, the mahogany sideboard in the dining room laid out with sweetbreads de champignon, boiled terrapin lightly flavored with nutmeg and sherry, yams and okra and red rice, raw oysters, Jerusalem artichokes, and a dozen desserts to choose from. Then Alma and Biancabella will play for them, cello and violin, until it’s time to go down to the basement and the evening’s anatomizing.
Madeleine turns another card, the Queen of Cups, and Porcelina frowns, not exactly what she was hoping for, already growing bored with Maddy’s dry prognostications; she looks over her left shoulder at Miss Aramat.
“I saw Samuel again this week,” she says. “He told me the bottle has started to sing at night, if the moon’s bright enough.”
Miss Aramat stops running her fingers through Isolde’s curly blonde hair and stares silently at Porcelina for a moment. Another sip of absinthe, sugar and anise on her tongue, and “I thought we had an understanding,” she says. “I thought I’d asked you not to mention him ever again, not in my presence, not in this house.”
Porcelina glances back down at the tarot card, pushes her violet-tinted pince-nez farther up the bridge of her nose.
“He says that the Jamaicans are offering him a lot of money for it.”
Across the room, Candida stops reading to Mary Rose, closes the copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and glares at Porcelina. “You may be the youngest,” she says. “But that’s no excuse for impudence. You were told”
“But I’ve seen it, with my own eyes I’ve seen it,” and now she doesn’t sound so bold, not half so confident as only an instant before. Madeleine is trying to ignore the whole affair, gathers up her deck and shuffles the cards.
“You’ve seen what he wants you to see. What he made you see,” Miss Aramat says. “Nothing more. The bottle’s a fairy tale, and Samuel and the rest of those old conjurers know damn well that’s all it will ever be.”
“But what if it isn’t? What if just one half the things he says are true?”
“Drop it,” Candida mutters and opens her book again.
“Yes,” Mary Rose says. “We’re all sick to death of hearing about Samuel and that goddamn bottle.”
But Miss Aramat keeps her bottomless hazel-green eyes on Porcelina, takes another small swallow of absinthe. She tangles her fingers in Isolde’s hair and pulls her head back sharply, exposing the girl’s pale throat to the room; they can all see the scars, the puckered worm-pink slashes between Isolde’s pretty chin and her high lace collar.
“Then you go and call him, Porcelina,” Miss Aramat says very softly. “Tell him to bring the bottle here, tonight. Tell him I want a demonstration.”
Madeleine stops shuffling her cards, and Biancabella reaches for the brandy, even though her glass isn’t empty.
“Before four o’clock, tell him, but after three. I don’t want him or one of his little boys interrupting the formalities.”
And when she’s absolutely certain that Miss Aramat has finished, when Isolde has finally been allowed to lower her chin and hide the scars, Porcelina stands up and goes alone to the telephone in the hallway.
In the basement of the house on East Hall Street there are three marble embalming tables laid end to end beneath a row of fluorescent lights. The lights one of Miss Aramat’s few, grudging concessions to modernity, though for a time they worked only by candlelight, and then incandescent bulbs strung above the tables. But her eyes aren’t what they used to be, and there was Biancabella’s astigmatism to consider, as well. So she bought the fluorescents in a government auction at Travis Field, and now every corner of the basement is bathed in stark white light, clinical light to illuminate the most secret recesses of their subjects.
Moldering red-brick walls, and here and there the sandy, earthen floor has been covered with sheets of varnished plywood, a makeshift, patchwork walkway so their boots don’t get too muddy whenever it rains. An assortment of old cabinets and shelves lines the walls, bookshelves and glass-fronted display cases; at least a thousand stoppered apothecary bottles, specimen jars of various shapes and sizes filled with ethyl alcohol or formalin to preserve the ragged things and bits of things that float inside. Antique microscopes, magnifying lenses, and prosthetic limbs, a human skeleton dangling from a hook screwed into the roof of its yellowed skull, each bone carefully labeled with India ink in Miss Aramat’s spidery hand.
Alma’s collection of aborted and pathologic fetuses occupies the entire northwest corner of the basement, and another corner has been given over to Mary Rose’s obsession with the cranium of Homo sapiens. So far, she has fifty-three (including the dozen or so sacrificed for Candida’s jack-o’-lanterns), classified as Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid, and Xanthochroid, according to T. H. Huxley’s 1870 treatise on the races of man. Opposite the embalming tables is a long, low counter of carved and polished oakhalf funereal shrine, half laboratory workbenchwhere Emily’s framed photographs of deceased members of the League and Society, lovingly adorned with personal mementos and bouquets of dried flowers, vie for space with Madeleine’s jumble of beakers, test tubes, and bell jars.
Nearer the stairs, there’s a great black double-door safe that none of them has ever tried to open, gold filigree and l. h. miller safe and ironworks, baltimore, m.d. painted on one door just above the brass combination dial. Long ago, before Miss Aramat was born, someone stored a portrait of an elderly woman in a blue dress atop the safe, anonymous, unframed canvas propped against the wall, and the years and constant damp have taken their toll. The painting has several large holes, the handiwork of insects and fungi, and the woman’s features have been all but obliterated.
“I’ve never even heard of a Skithian,” Isolde says, reaching behind her back to tie the strings of her apron.
“Scythian, dear,” Miss Aramat corrects her. “S-c-y, like scythe, but the c and y make a short i instead of a long i.”
“Oh,” Isolde says and yawns. “Well, I’ve never heard of them, either,” and she watches as Biancabella makes the first cut, drawing her scalpel expertly between the small breasts of the woman lying on the middle table. Following the undertaker’s original Y incision, she slices cleanly through the sutures that hold the corpse’s torso closed.
“An ancient people who probably originated in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia,” Biancabella says as she carefully traces the line of stitches. “Their kingdom was conquered by the Iranian Sarmatians, and by the early sixth century BC they’d mostly become nomads wandering the Kuban, and later the Pontic steppes”
Isolde yawns again, louder than before, loud enough to interrupt Biancabella. “You sound like a teacher I had in high school. He always smelled like mentholated cough drops.”
“They might have been Iranian,” Madeleine says. “I know I read that somewhere.”
Biancabella sighs and stops cutting the sutures, her blade lingering an inch or so above the dead woman’s navel, and she glares up at Madeleine.
“They were not Iranian. Haven’t you even bothered to read Plinius?” she asks and points the scalpel at Madeleine. “ ‘Ultra sunt Scytharum populi, Persae illos Sacas in universum applelavere a proxima gente, antiqui Arameos.’ ”
“Where the hell is Arameos?” Madeleine asks, cocking one eyebrow suspiciously.
“Northern Mesopotamia.”
“Who cares?” Isolde mumbles, and Biancabella shakes her head in disgust and goes back to work. “Obviously, some more than others,” she says.
Miss Aramat reaches for the half-empty bottle of wine that Mary Rose has left on the table near the corpse’s knees. She takes a long swallow of the burgundy, wipes her mouth across the back of her hand, smearing her lipstick slightly. “According to Herodotus, the Scythians disemboweled their dead kings,” she says and passes the bottle to Isolde. “Then they stuffed the abdominal cavity with cypress, parsley seed, frankincense, and anise. Afterwards, the body was sewn shut again and entirely covered with wax.”
Biancabella finishes with the sutures, lays aside her scalpel and uses both hands to force open the dead woman’s belly. The sweet, caustic smells of embalming fluid and rot, already palpable in the stagnant basement air, seem to rise like steam from the interior of the corpse.
“Of course, we don’t have the parsley seed,” she says and glances across the table at Porcelina, “because someone’s Greek isn’t exactly what it ought to be.”
“It’s close enough,” Porcelina says defensively, and she points an index finger at the bowl of fresh, chopped parsley lined up with all the other ingredients for the ritual. “I can’t imagine that Miss Whoever She Might Be here’s going to give a damn one way or another.”
Biancabella begins inserting her steel dissection hooks through the stiffened flesh at the edges of the incision, each hook attached to a slender chain fastened securely to the rafters overhead. “Will someone please remind me again why we took this little quim in?”
“Well, she’s a damn good fuck,” Madeleine says. “At least when she’s sober.”
“And she makes a mean corn pudding,” Alma adds.
“Oh, yes. The corn pudding. How could I have possibly forgotten the corn pudding.”
“Next time,” Porcelina growls, “you can fucking do it yourselves.”
“No, dear,” Miss Aramat says, her voice smooth as the tabletop, cold as the heart of the dead woman. “Next time, you’ll do it right. Or there may not be another time after that.”
Porcelina turns her back on them, then, turning because she’s afraid they might see straight through her eyes to the hurt and doubt coiled about her soul. She stares instead at the louvered window above Mary Rose’s skulls, the glass painted black, shiny, thick black latex to stop the day and snooping eyes.
“Well, you have to admit, at least then we’d never have to hear about that fucking bottle again,” Candida laughs, and, as though her laughter were an incantation, skillful magic to shatter the moment, the back doorbell rings directly overhead. A buzz like angry, electric wasps filtered through the floorboards, and Miss Aramat looks at Porcelina, who hasn’t taken her eyes off the window.
