Irregular Creatures Read online

“Go on down and ask him, he’ll tell you.”

  “Bullshit.” That he said in English. It sounded like Boo-Shit.

  Nolan moved fast – he took out the two chopsticks, one in each hand, and thrust them up against both sides of Chedma’s trachea. He pressed their tips tight against the man’s throat – would he be able to thrust them through? Would he be willing to puncture this man’s air-tube and watch the poor bastard struggle to get suck oxygen from those puckered holes? Did he want Tasanee that badly?

  He didn’t have to answer that question.

  “I learned this trick from your buddy, Mhu.” Nolan grinned, teeth together. He felt mean, smart, devious. Powerful. And hungry to see that beautiful view again. “I get what I want. I always get what I want. Stand aside, so I can take what’s mine.”

  In Thai: “You’re a stupid man.”

  Nolan winked. “We’re all stupid. Open up.”

  And then he felt something hard – and sharp – press against his crotch. His eyes darted downward to find Chedma’s hand there. Holding a big knife.

  “Pierce my throat, I cut your baby-maker.”

  “I need to see her.”

  Chedma smiled. “You’re not the first.” As Nolan dropped the chopsticks, Chedma hit him in the eye. Then another fist to the nose. Nolan dropped to one knee, and felt blood trickle from both nostrils. His one eye was half-closed and watering. He found the knife blade at his throat.

  “Sorry, farang, show’s over.”

  Then—

  “Let him in.”

  The voice.

  That voice.

  The blade stopped, and Nolan looked up to see her – She-of-the-Heavenly-View – standing there in the doorway behind Chedma. She wore nothing. She was shaved clean. Nolan smelled jasmine. Vanilla. Something else, too, heady and dark like fresh mulch.

  Blood trickled from a nick on his throat. It dripped along the knife’s edge before Chedma took it away; the guard flicked the knife, flecking the wall with dots of red.

  He looked down at Nolan, and shrugged. “You’ll wish I cut your throat, white boy.”

  Nolan barely heard him. He stood up, buoyed by her presence, then stumbled into Tasanee’s arms. Her skin was hot, her breath cold. She held him for a moment, and then led him into the dim light of her chamber.

  ***

  The room: spare, dark, a stink of must and mold and urine. The ladyboy lived (and fucked) in far kinder quarters. This place should’ve been a palace, Nolan thought. No carpet except for stray red fibers pinched beneath fat nails in the floorboards. Two fat roaches wrestled with one another in the corner. Something scratched behind the walls.

  Only one pretty thing in this room: her.

  Giddy from her presence, Nolan wiped blood from his nose where he’d been hit, then staggered over to the one window overlooking Patpong Street. He didn’t look out the window – couldn’t, no way he was tearing his eyes away from her – but instead stood framed by the runny rainbow of neon colors coming from outside. (The colors reminded him of a child’s vomit after eating colorful birthday cake.)

  In the center of the room sat a folding chair. Unpadded.

  Tasanee eased herself onto the chair, one leg placed on each side. The way she moved was like a cloud’s shadow drifting. Or a drizzle of olive oil oozing toward the center of a hot pan.

  Her arm extended – liquid, tentacular – and she waved him closer.

  “This room…you deserve more…” he said, moving toward her.

  “Shhh,” she said.

  “It doesn’t suit you. It’s too ugly. You’re too pretty.” He bit his tongue. “Pretty? Pretty doesn’t even come close. You are beyond that. Beyond human description.”

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  “I’ll see,” he reiterated, numb, mumbling, happy.

  She pulled him close and dropped him to his knees. A long fingernail scooped up some of the blood running red from his nose. She ate from the upturned nail as if it were a little spoon.

  Tasanee put that hand against the back of his head and eased him forward. Her legs crept apart as Nolan moved in closer. Her pussy was there, only inches away – it really was like a flower, petals upon petals, its honeyed center calling to him.

  He knew what she wanted. Nolan understood his task. He eased his tongue out and tasted. It tasted of rice wine, strawberries, coconut milk. Behind that, other flavors, unreal flavors, lurked: a child’s cries, a animal’s strangled howl, the blood of the innocent, the taste of spoiled meat. All the tastes mingled, formed something incomprehensible, something sickening and delicious.

  And then the flesh closed upon his tongue, snapping shut like a rat trap, and he felt something tugging, pulling, wrenching.

  White light and noise filled his mind as his tongue loosened from its moorings and came free in a hot wet tide, and he went to scream – but couldn’t.

  And then, the pussy opened again, and he could see deep within its dark channels and infinite folds.

  ***

  Oh, the things Nolan saw.

  Light shone from a rip in the heavens. Black clouds tore like paper.

  He saw bodies falling, first in the dozens, then in the hundreds, each dark figure a shadow in that wide and uneven beam.

  Those bodies had wings.

  And weapons made of fire.

  But they were not conquering – they were falling. The wings were not working, and only folded behind the shapes, broken and bent.

  But it wasn’t just what Nolan saw. He felt things, too.

  He felt betrayal in his heart. He felt sadness sit in his gut like a stone. He felt the awfulness of a door being closed forever, and the oily phobic feeling of being trapped in tight spaces, shoulder-to-shoulder, At his sides he felt the breath of rabid dogs, the touch of stinking lepers, the whispers from syphilitic angels.

  And then, the light from the sky winked out, and darkness fell with so many bodies.

  ***

  He awoke.

  The door to the room shattered inward with Chedma’s foot. Mhu hurried in, trailed by the guard.

  They were not the same men Nolan had met earlier. Mhu was fatter – his skin lay pale against bulbous bones, and black glass marble eyes sat deep in the puffy folds of his doughy face. His mouth was broad, and lined with teeth like carpenter nails. Chedma, however, had no face at all: the flesh there was smooth, featureless and pulsing faint and fast like a toad’s heart.

  The room had changed, too. No longer was it the shit-trap Nolan remembered. No, it had become a temple of red velvet and smoldering braziers. Glyphs and sigils adorned the ceiling, painted in something black and still wet. And moving.

  Then there was Tasanee.

  Her skin? Chalk white. Like bone or porcelain.

  Behind her hung a pair of broken wings – the feathers were oily and limp, the blue-black of a raven wing.

  Her eyes were red. Her lips were red.

  So was the cleft between her legs. Smeared red with his blood.

  The pussy a snapping mouth, a sinewy flytrap with teeth of hair and bone. It crunched hungrily on something. Nolan’s tongue.

  “You’ve done it again,” Mhu said, sounding disappointed. He spoke in a language that wasn’t English, wasn’t Thai. Wasn’t human, Nolan thought.

  “He wished to worship,” Tasanee said in the same tongue. “He wanted to see. Dare I deny any mortal the pleasure – the grace – they are rightly owed?”

  “But now he knows,” Mhu said. “He knows what we are. He is forever changed. His eyes will see.”

  “So he can see. We have been here since the monkeys dropped from the trees like over-ripe fruit, and we will continue to be until long after they burn themselves up. One or two from time to time is a pleasure for us. Besides, he can do nothing about it.” She laughed the sound of bells tinkling. “He is no holy man.”

  “It is a mistake –“ Mhu stammered.

  “You condemn my actions? My actions? Do not be so quick to forget your place or I will see you
r flesh pressed into parchment upon which I write the laws that will sentence you to your endless displeasure.”

  Had he gone mad? Nolan felt like a lunatic, lost and fumbling in a maze of his own making. He tried to say something – anything – but his stumpy tongue found no purchase, filling his mouth with blood. He stepped forward, and found himself hardly able to stand.

  “Take him,” Tasanee whispered. “Release him.”

  He felt hands under his armpits. He tried to kick and scream, but he could barely find the strength. His eyes burned. His mouth bled and he struggled not to choke.

  He turned to get one last look at Tasanee.

  Even after all that had happened –

  – she was truly a heavenly view.

  ***

  They dragged him downstairs, through the bar.

  He saw women grinding against men, but they were not women. One had skin of obsidian. Another had banded flesh like a coral snake.

  One had many arms, and breasts covered in little lamprey mouths.

  Outside, on Patpong Street, Nolan saw several men walking down the street, oblivious to the chattering imps nesting upon their heads like living skullcaps, feeding on brains like rotten grapefruits.

  In the skies above, he saw figures flying with bent and broken wings. The moon was pink and fibrous: a disc of raw meat. No light shone from it.

  Somewhere down the way, he caught sight of Nils weaving through the crowd, smiling that foxy smile, and he reached out to call for him. But he only gurgled blood.

  LETHE AND MNEMOSYNE

  They eased the photos down in front of the old man, who gnawed a lip and peered at them through narrowed eye.

  “Please,” his daughter said, pushing the hospital tray full of photos toward him, “you need to remember.”

  In one photo, the old man’s father — their grandfather — sat in the cab of a gleaming John Deere tractor in the middle of a bright, broad cornfield, the tractor eclipsed by a giant, fat-necked Rhode Island Red hen with a rose comb on top. The hen was caught mid-gobble, her beak snapping up whole corn cobs right off their stalks.

  In the photo after, the old man as a boy sat on his father’s lap as the man handed over his farm ledgers to a goat-legged fellow wearing suspenders and a pair of mud-caked boots. Everybody wore smiles.

  In the third and fourth photos, the old man as a teenager was gunning a 1952 Chevy Bel Air hard-top across beach sands the color of custard. A mermaid sat on the hood, black ravens-wing hair cascading behind her, her eyes wild, her red mouth laughing.

  “Pop,” the son said, “they’ve seen the hen down off of Route Nine, and godsamnit if she hasn’t torn the top from the Walsatch’s silo. You need to think on how you get that chicken to leave this town again, ‘cause this world isn’t made for that kind of thing anymore. Think, Pop, think. We need you to remember.”

  “This can’t go on,” the daughter says. “Eleanor Walsatch says they might sue. We can’t handle another lawsuit.”

  “Is it a word?” the son asked. “Is that what sends the hen away? Is there something you used to scratch in the dirt?”

  The old man looked at the photos one more time, but the truth was, the stroke had left his brain a mess, and no matter how long he stared, he remembered none of it.

  THE AUCTION

  “Listen to me,” Benjamin’s father said, looking down at him. “I brought you here because I think you’ll get a kick out of this. But I had to pull some strings. So, we need to lay some ground rules.”

  Here was, as far as Benjamin could tell, the middle of nowhere. The two of them stood in a gravel-strewn parking lot in front of a cluster of aluminum warehouses, each silent and still with nothing else around us. No houses, no other buildings. A lot of cars, though – many of them that looked expensive. Benjamin saw a few horse and buggies, too. From the local Amish, he guessed.

  “Uh,” Benjamin said. “Okay.”

  “When we go in, you stick with me unless I tell you different.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t talk to anyone.”

  The boy was growing scared. “What is this place?”

  “It’s the Auction,” Dad said, smiling nervously.

  “It’s just an auction?” Benjamin asked. “What’s the big deal?”

  His father paused, seemed to consider his words.

  “This isn’t just any auction. This is the Auction.”

  The boy felt scared. Excited. Numbly, he nodded.

  And with that, they went inside.

  ***

  It was an assault on the senses.

  Benjamin’s nose caught a heady mixture of odors: hay, motor oil, fresh popcorn. Beneath that lurked a secret layer of sweat, of animal musk, of old wood and kicked-up dust.

  In his ears rang a sudden cacophony that did not exist outside these dark walls. He heard chickens clucking and crowing, a motor chugging along somewhere out of sight, the buzz of lights, and the constant burbling murmur of a hundred – maybe a thousand – voices.

  But it was his eyes that took the brunt of the assault.

  The metal buildings were crammed together unceremoniously, but their modernity ended there. It was as if someone had disassembled a dozen barns and cobbled them back together within these walls, each one shoved into the other at odd angles. Straw covered an uneven wooden floor. Stall after stall lined the right wall (and Benjamin thought he saw some big pigs or other beasts jostling around in those rickety booths), and in the center sat crates and cages piled to the ceiling. Amish men with black brim hats and dark beards clambered up ladders, withdrawing chickens and cats from tottering boxes. Past all that, Benjamin could see several old-timey cars, a few tractors, and other machines with gears, belts and whirring blades that offered no obvious purpose. Above it all hung strings of dissimilar lights and lanterns, all swaying gently and buzzing with an electric hum.

  “This isn’t even all of it,” his father whispered in his ear. He sounded excited, more excited than he had sounded in a year. “There’s so much more to see. I can’t wait.”

  His father clipped a plastic-sheathed badge to his shirt pocket. It listed his name and the company he worked for: Bob, E-Tech.

  “Come on, Bob,” he said with a wink. “Let’s go see the machines.”

  ***

  His father ducked through the crowd like an old pro. Benjamin struggled to keep up, feeling like a one-finned salmon swimming up a rapid stream. Shoulders and elbows formed a ceaseless parade of human turnstiles.

  “Coming through!” a little man, nearly no taller than Benjamin himself, came and manhandled Benjamin out of the way as his father continued. Behind the little man came two more men, except these fellows were big lugs with overalls and greasy mullets.

  Benjamin’s jaw dropped.

  The two men carried a tomato that was as big as a medicine ball.

  They wrestled it past the throngs of people. As they passed by, Benjamin swore he saw a face on the far side the vegetable – the tip of a nose, the hint of a swollen brow – but then they were gone, carrying it away to who-knows-where. The little man went with them. Benjamin turned to catch up to his father, who was now a bobbing brown head deep in the crowd.

  “Dad!” he called. Getting lost in Wal-Mart, but losing his way in this place was a whole other enchilada. His heart was thudding in his chest.

  A fireplug of a woman – red hair topped with a blaze orange hunter’s hat – stood in Benjamin’s way. She had two cats, one under each crooked arm.

  Benjamin stepped to the left, and she did too. He tried to go right, and she frowned and did the same.

  “No time to dance,” she grumbled. “Gotta get these kitties home, dude.”

  Giving him an apologetic look, she shoved past him.

  He took a fleeting look, and then had to look again.

  The cats had wings. He was sure of it. They were tucked behind them, smooshed under her arm and layi
ng awkwardly against their cat backs, but those were wings, weren’t they?

  But then like the tomato men she was gone, swallowed by the crowd.

  Benjamin stood staring at a fixed point in space. People passed him, a stone in the river. He felt weird. Almost queasy. Something wasn’t right. Gigantic tomatoes with faces? Cats with wings?

  And then his father was there, jiggling his shoulder, beaming like a kid climbing a candy mountain.

  “Come on. Come on! To the machines,” he said, grinning.

  “Dad,” Benjamin said, having to yell a bit over the noise of the crowd. “Something weird is going on here.”

  “You bet it is.”

  “What?”

  His Dad began to point.

  Benjamin’s eyes followed the line of his finger.

  He saw a man currying a horse in a tall stall, which at first did not seem strange. The horse stomped and showed its chest like a proud, puffed-up beast. Then Benjamin saw that the horse was definitely of a different color with a coat red like dried blood. Benjamin’s eyes widened as he realized that the horse also had a pair of ram’s horns, one on each side of its head. Each turned inward in a bumpy spiral. Benjamin took in a sharp, surprised breath.

  “That horse does more than kick,” his father whispered, then pointed somewhere else.

  Across from the stalls, a man in a seersucker suit stood eyeing up a big glass jar. Inside, about a dozen or so soft yellow lights floated lazily about.

  “Inexhaustible fireflies,” Dad said. “They never die, never burn out. Legend says that if you eat one, you can breathe fire three times. And over there –“

  Benjamin followed the pointing finger again and saw through the crowd a cluster of men in ochre robes churning sticks into a big wooden-slatted vat. Their faces were concealed by the hem of their hoods.

  “The Confraternity of Saint Aloicious,” he said. “They come every year and offer ice cream to the people. For free, of course, as they believe that such an act somehow salves the miseries of the human condition.”