by Caitlín R. Kiernan
This is the story of the hole in the ground.
“Our souls are damned,” E said, and she folded open the pearl-handled straight razor. I know that she doesn’t believe in souls, and I know, too, that she knows I know. But it’s a game, a staple of this pantomime. The stainless-steel blade catches the bathroom light and flashes it back. The razor is one of the lovers she’s not yet found the courage to fuck. There are a lot of those, but the razor is the most immediate, the most precious, and, I would say, the most cheated. She taunts the razor at the very precipice of orgasm. It may as well be the soft pad of her index finger pressed against my clit, the way she folds that razor open, then trails vulnerable flesh along metal, almost, almost slicing. Only ever almost. Only ever until tonight, but I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t see how that will profit anyone. E studies every minute detail of the blade. She is intimately familiar with its history, knows it like she knows the inside of her eyelids, and I understand this familiarity is crucial to. . .what? This is a ritual, I suppose. Did I ever suppose that before this moment?
“W.H. Morley and Sons, Clover Brand—” and she pauses to point out to me the tiny clover stamped into the narrow tang, there before the deadly-sweet shank, sharp as her grey eyes. “—and the handle only looks like old ivory or bone.”
The handle is yellowed, like a mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth.
“French Ivory celluloid,” she says and shuts off the tap. The water in the tub steams in our cold bathroom. The window above her, the width of a grave, has completely fogged over. Nothing outside worth seeing anyway. “Manufactured in Austria, 1923, between the wars. There on the handle, I believe that’s one of the lotus-eaters of, maybe, the Isle of Djerba or the country of the Gindanes.” E adds, “A lotophage.”
I know she got all that last bit off Wikipedia, because E’s a lazy scholar. But, yes, there is the figure of a nude woman molded or carved, I don’t know which, into the handle. The nude woman’s arms are upraised, and above her is a single flower stained red. I don’t know if it was stained red when it left the factory. Morley and Sons wherever in Austria. But now there is that splotch of red, rather like an invitation. The woman stands inside the blossom of a second flower, though it isn’t stained red. The flowers look nothing like lotus.
She’s still talking. She doesn’t need an audience to listen.
She doesn’t need an assembly for her oratories.
“‘Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?’”
She holds the razor up to the light and reclines in her hot bath. I sit on the toilet seat while she recites Tennyson. I don’t look at her, because then I can’t pretend nothing has changed. I can’t pretend that we can return to that time back to before the hole. The Hole. And I’m tired of looking at her face, and I’m sick of seeing the razor. I count the filthy, once-white hexagonal tiles of the floor.
“It’ll all be a pretty story when you’re done,” she says, and I shake my head.
“I’m never writing this.”
“Of course you will.”
“You’re seriously fucking deluded.”
“Oh, you’ll write about it. You’ll never see a god again. You’ll write about it.”
She laughs, and I wince—no, I actually do wince—because I know she’s absolutely goddamn right. However this goes, I’ll write it down. I’m already composing sentences in my head, sick fuck that I am. I stare at the tiles, and I listen to her razor soliloquy, and I think back on the day it begins, a day faded down almost to twilight, the day when we found the damned thing. That’s more than a month ago, far back in January. We’re picking our way through the snow-scabbed, brown-weeded wastes on the western bank of the Seekonk River. Near the old railroad leading out to that towering drawbridge that’s been raised since sometime in the 1970s. It’s a rust cathedral, girders and bolts instead of flying buttresses, but it’s still a cathedral. E’s looking through the trash, because it’s something she does. Me, I’m just along for the ride, freezing my ass off and wishing she’d get bored and announce that it’s time to head back towards Gano Street and town.
I’m trying not to shiver. E says only pussies shiver.
We come upon a sheet of corrugated tin or aluminum, and she reaches down and pulls it back to reveal a barren patch of ground. No, not genuinely barren. Better if it had been truly barren. It’s black, and no weeds grow there, and so at first it strikes me as barren. But, in point of fact, there’s pale mold and a riot of tiny brown-capped mushrooms that have grown in the shadow E has now taken away. She leans close, asking herself aloud if maybe they’re a psychedelic species, packed with psilocybin.
“Hey, you know, we could pick them, take them back to the apartment and find out,” she suggests.
“Of the many ways I would rather not fucking die, poisoning myself by eating toxic mushrooms is high on the list.”
E scowls. “Pussy,” she says. She’s tossed the sheet of tin—or aluminum—aside and is on her knees now at the very edge of that not-quite-barren patch of ground. She begins to pick one of the brown mushrooms, but then something else catches her eye. It catches my eye a few seconds afterwards. She’s almost always the first to notice anything even just the slightest bit out of place. And this is out of place.
In the tub, E’s moved on to James Joyce, episode five of Ulysses.
“It’s really goddamn tiresome,” I say so quietly I’m hardly even whispering. I’m only breathing out syllables. “Do it, or don’t fucking do it, but it’s really goddamn tiresome the way you go on and on and on.”
“You want me to do it,” she says.
“I want you to shut the fuck up, that’s what I want. I want you to get out of that tub and dry off and throw the razor in the trash and let’s never talk about it ever again.”
“You don’t want much, do you?” she asks. “Think it’s going to go away?” she asks and raises her left arm so I have to see what’s happening to her. So I have to gaze directly at the corruption eating at her.
Below the sheet of corrugated metal, there in the mold and mushrooms, there is a hole. It can’t be more than four inches across. I can’t recall how to calculate diameter, but the hole can’t be more than five inches across, so it certainly isn’t a very big hole. And while it is a hole in the ground, it isn’t a dirt hole. The edges are pink and puckered and fleshy, and its rim puts me more in mind of an enormous asshole than anything else. A sickly shade of pink, like a burn scar, like proud flesh with blue-white veins, and it looks wet and sticky and warm.
Gotta be another sort of fungus, I think. What else would I think?
I tug at the back of her hoodie, like that was going to do any good.
“What the hell . . .?” she begins and trails off.
I go back to counting the hexagons. “There are these places called hospitals,” I say. I say again.
“You seriously think this is anything—”
“I seriously fucking think we don’t know whether they could help or not,” I say, interrupting her, and she laughs and splashes.
“An apocalypse of the flesh,” E smiles. I do not have to look at her face, and the corruption that has also taken hold there, to know that she’s smiling. “Do you know the original meaning of apocalypse? Not a catastrophe. Not the end of the world. It means revelation, a vision, a sudden insight.”
She goes back to describing the razor.
“I have to die to finish it,” E tells me. Again.
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No you’re not,” she says. She’s right.
There in the weedy patch on the bank of the Seekonk, E whispers, her voice filled all at once with awe and curiosity. With, I suppose, apocalypse. She whispers, “Oh my god, what is that?”
“One of the nastiest things I have ever seen,” I answer, even if I am well aware the question was rhetorical. She doesn’t want to know. E never wants to know, because knowing would serve no end but erasing a mystery.
She scoots closer to the hole, smushing mushrooms beneath the knees of her jeans, scraping up the scum of mold with denim.
“Seriously. It’s disgusting. Just leave it the fuck alone.”
But I’m too late, and she’s already touched the outermost edge of the hole, and it quivers like Jell-O. No, I’m not too late, she wouldn’t have listened, anyway. Where E touched the hole, a dime-sized crimson blister has formed.
“Jesus,” I hiss. “Please. You don’t have any idea what that shit is.”
“Exactly,” E replies, and she almost sounds sensible. “It’s warm,” she says, so I was right about that. Then she lays her left hand down flat against the pink whatever it is. “It’s warm . . . and it’s sort of pulsing. Or throbbing.”
For a moment I honestly believe I’m going to vomit.
The mirror on the medicine cabinet door has also steamed over. I wish my eyes could do the same. The pills are in there, the ones she’s been taking for the pain, eating them for a week now. Eating them like candy. I have asked her how much it hurts. I only have to see her arm, that patch on her right cheek, and the inside of her thighs to know it must fucking hurt like fucking hell.
She’s talking about the razor again.
“They didn’t have the nerve, either,” says E. “They must have done this, pretty much the same thing as this, trying and unable to make it stop.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I might. The voices are getting louder, and they have an awful lot to say.”
“Then stop listening.”
“When a god talks, you don’t stop listening.”
When a god talks. I’m not about to have that argument again. It’s not that I lose. You can’t lose an argument with a brick wall.
“It’s got plans, right? Maybe I’m holding this razor, and maybe I even want to use it. I think that person before me definitely also kept trying, but it has plans.”
E put her arm into that hole, and she pulled out the straight razor.
“Zombie ants,” I say to her. “I told you about the zombie ants. Maybe they think a god’s talking to them, too.”
“Fucking ants don’t think shit.”
Zombie ants.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that grows in tropical jungles all around the world. Its spores get into an ant, and somehow they force—rewire its fucking tiny ant brain—to clamp down on a leaf, into the a particular vein at a very specific height off the ground. And the zombie ant just hangs there, and the fungus kills it, changes its exoskeleton, until fruiting bodies have filled up its head. The dead ant’s head bursts, spreading more spores, infecting more ants, making more zombies.
“Gods don’t talk to bugs.”
“You think you’re anything more than a bug to this thing?”
E slides down until only her face is left above the steaming water. A new crimson blister appears below her right eye. I begin to say something that isn’t an argument, as if I haven’t already tried that, as well. I love you, and I’m watching while some kind of parasite, some kind of cancer, is eating you alive, and you won’t let me help you.
Why haven’t I called an ambulance? Good damn question, right? Is the god from that hole muttering in my ears, too?
I count tiles and listen to the faucet dripping.
She’s started in all over again about the razor being like a lotus flower. You eat the flower, and then there’s peace. You draw the blade down your forearms and across your wrists, or you cut to the chase and open up your throat, and there’s no more pain. Only, of course, that’s not what her new god wants. Suicide would interrupt the cycle.
E reaches down into that hole, which is a lot deeper than I would have thought. She reaches in, and something changes about her expression. Just as though somebody flips a switch. But I can’t describe the change. I’ve tried. Fuck all knows I’ve tried. Her face changes, her expression, and, a few seconds later, when she withdraws her hand she’s holding the antique Austrian razor. She raises it, opens it, and the blade glints faintly in the last of the daylight. Her arm glistens, wet with whatever that stuff the red blister’s secreting.
“Oh my god, it’s beautiful,” E says. “Who the hell would have just left something this cool lying in a hole?”
I’m supposing that god wasn’t talking to her yet.
“You’re not going to keep that.”
“Shit yeah, I am.”
E stands before the tall mirror in our bedroom, nude as she is in the bath. Her back is to me, and yet I can watch her eyes. Even scarred, she is as beautiful now as she has ever been. I see her, front and back. I see her, shattered and whole. She says a god is whispering in her ear, but I’m watching Hell devour her. She has become a tiny boat on a vast sea of paradoxes, and I can only watch. Standing here before the tall mirror, she smiles and plays with her left nipple. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such joy in her eyes, such complete delight. The razor is lying nearby, atop the chest of drawers
“Fuck me,” she says, but I don’t want to. I can hardly stand the thought of touching her, because if I touch her then I’m also touching it.
“Remember that night out on the Cape?” I ask, changing the subject. “The night we watched the Perseids from Newcomb Hollow Beach?”
My iPhone buzzes and I answer it. It’s work, wanting to know why I’m late again.
“Star fall, phone call,” E smiles at me from the mirror.
Is this all a game to her? Do the zombie ants think that they’re playing some sort of game? E says that bugs don’t think.
“Tomorrow,” I promise the voice at the other end of the line, even though I know the promise is a lie. “I’ll be in tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll feel much better by then.”
A week ago I’d have been terrified of losing my job; now it’s something that seems to exist in a time and a place I’ll never get back to, not ever again.
If I was ever there.
“We should go back there,” E says, masturbating for her reflection. “Next July, we should go back there and watch the sky again.” The tone of her voice hasn’t changed. She doesn’t sound like someone masturbating, and I wonder if she knows she’s doing it. Maybe this is another compulsive act, like all the baths. Something she’s only dimly conscious she’s doing, but that the god in her head needs to complete the cycle. I can’t turn away. It doesn’t matter what she’s becoming, what’s becoming of her, she’s still beautiful, and I still adore the sight of her.
“Yes,” I tell her. “We’ll go back there.”
Her hand stops moving, and she frowns—but only very, very slightly. If I hadn’t spent the last two years with her, I might not know she was frowning.
“I don’t want to leave,” she says, and I say I don’t want her to leave, either.
“Maybe,” she says, “if I used the razor—”
“You’d be leaving, either way,” I reply. “It’s only two different doors.” And that’s assuming that the shit from the hole wouldn’t be just as happy with her corpse as with a living host. That’s assuming a goddamn lot.
“I can’t remember why I did it. Isn’t that odd?”
A drop of pinkish slime drips from between her legs and spatters the floorboards between her bare feet. I want to burn the building down.
“All I remember is that it seemed very urgent. Like, all my life had been such a waste right up until then, but if I just reached inside that hole everything would have meaning, finally, forever and forever.”
“But you don’t feel that way anymore?”
She never answers the question. Her smile comes back, and she turns her back to the mirror. “Fuck me,” she says. And that’s what I do. Doesn’t matter how much the corruption that has taken root on her—in her—body disgusts me. I make love to her, knowing that I am also making love to it. I more than half expect, in the moment that we both come, only seconds apart (which never happens), that I’ll hear the god inside her skull, too.
She lies beside me on sheets that needed to be washed a month or so ago, and she stares up at the ceiling. Her eyes look glassy. I notice that it’s spread to her throat, and I can’t remember if it had before we had sex. It’s moving fast now. It’s impatient to be born, and maybe that orgasm was the last bit of adrenaline it needs to bite down hard on that leaf and hold on. I talk to her, but she doesn’t talk back. She only nods a few times, shakes her head once or twice. I ask if it hurts, and she doesn’t nod or shake her head, but I go to the bathroom and get the pills from the medicine cabinet. I bring her the pills and a glass of water, and E takes three of them, then lies down again.
“Do you want the razor?” I ask, and E shakes her head. But I go to the chest of drawers and get it for her anyway. I put it in her hands, which are as limp as a ragdoll. Then I get dressed and go out, telling myself there a few things that we urgently need from the market, and that she’ll only take a nap while I’m gone.
I can be awfully good at lying to myself.
“I won’t be gone long. Get some rest. I’ll fix dinner when I get back.”
E nods and smiles sleepily.
In the weeds near the Seekonk River, she’s already started scratching at the back of the hand she put into the hole. I want to go back and cover up that hole. We should have, I think. We should have left it exactly the way that we fucking found it.
I’m gone longer than I meant to be, because I run into a friend, and you’d never know from our conversation that this day was any different from any other. It’s dark by the time I get back to our street, and it’s begun snowing. Fat flakes drifting down to earth like falling stars, like spores, like gods tumbling from imagined heavens. By morning, there will be almost a foot blanketing Providence.
I knew perfectly well that E would be gone, but it still takes me by surprise.
Somewhere soon there will be another hole in the ground.
At least she left the razor lying on the bed, and I sit holding it for a long, long time, staring at that yellowed French Ivory celluloid handle, wishing that the flowers truly were lotuses.
Caitlín R. Kiernan sold her first short story in 1993, and since then her short fiction has been collected in numerous volumes, beginning with Tales of Pain and Wonder, and including the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, and most recently The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan. Her novels include The Red Tree and the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.