Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster
The Maid is bidden to speak
She declareth her Godhead
The Bears crave a token of her
. . .
Now is the token made manifest
Glad are the Bears
They give the God to eat
—William Morris, marginal headings from The Wood Beyond the World
I
She had never before been invited into her brother’s dungeon. The secret entrance opened with a salacious creak, and the fire of the nearest torch blew back as if in fear.
She descended like a cold wind into his dark places. He was chained to the dungeon wall with his shirt untucked and open for maximum expansion. On the long table were pliers, awls, and a large orange funnel.
“You called me, brother?” she asked. “I was having the dullest dream.”
“Then there’s still time,” he sweat. “Sister, will you help me?”
“What do I have to do?’” Her dress rang heavy and velvet down her thigh.
“You have to take that funnel and slide it down my throat,” he said, “and pour grain down it for twenty minutes at a time, three times a day until the next full moon.”
She frowned as she touched the funnel. It was a hard plastic and would haunt the earth for ever, the useful unconsumed in the moment of its usefulness.
“Must I, brother?”
He looked at her pleadingly.
“I’ve been reading in father’s library,” he said. “It is the only way. I must be made acceptable when the Tigress comes.”
His upper lip was moist. She sighed, and her hand shook as she reached out to lay it tenderly against his breastbone.
II
One corner of the room held a manger. It was full of intestines, coiled and silky.
“For the horses,” my host explained, in the voice of St. Christopher Lee.
“Can’t you feed them oats?” I asked, a guileless naïf.
“No … if they’re given oats they become able to speak, and I cannot abide their idle gossip.”
As we left the room he stroked one of the horses in passing, a long white hand along a long white face. The hallway we entered was full of incense and framed portraits.
“Ikons of the Saints,” he explained. We passed below a portrait of St. Solitude, who looked out with eyes that could eat death. “We live on their images, as you know.”
Across from her was a portrait of St. Lina with her legs spread. I paused to kiss the lower frame of her picture, and pray that my throat might speak in her voice.
III
“You asked for me, Doctor?”
“Yes, Doctor. Shut the door.”
It swung heavy behind him. The window to the doctor’s left was covered by a velvet curtain; the one to his right was full of a mahogany fog.
“Sit down, Doctor.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
As the younger doctor pulled back the chair to sit, the older one leaned forward on steepled fingers, intimidating the space his colleague was about to occupy. This is best imagined from a side view and slightly below.
“Doctor,” he imposed, “are you… a doctor?”
“Yes, of c—, well. Only if you—I mean, not absolutely and irrevocably, Doctor.”
“Indeed . . . I have long suspected you of a reluctance to pass certain thresholds in the doctor’s craft.”
“I was taught that a good doctor knows when to stop.”
“Who taught you that, a fucking nurse?” The doctor lit a cigar and stood up from the desk. “A good doctor takes no prisoners.”
He went to the velvet curtain and pulled it back, revealing not a window but a large chart of all the human organs, arranged not anatomically but in a hierarchical pyramid.
“You’ll remember this from your studies. Here at the bottom are the or-gans that are most comfortable and unassuming. Can a true doctor be content to live on such, grazing like a beast?”
IV
“There you are,” her brother snapped.
“I’m sorry!” she said, gasping after running up all the stairs of his tower. He is twelve in this scene, and she is about eleven.
“You have your necklace?”
“Yes, I brought it.” She unclasped the pendant, which held a long black feather, and he snatched it out of her hand. “Why do you need it?”
“I’m going to summon the ghost of your bird so I can feed it to the ghost of my cat.”
“Will that kill him?” she asked.
He only glared at her in silence.
“I guess—it was a stupid question,” she said, looking down at her thumbs.
He swept aside the objections of the small concentric rug to reveal the magic circle he had inscribed beneath. He set the necklace in the center and his favorite creepy dolls around it at the four cardinal directions. He had stripped the dolls naked, as he was wont to.
She eyed them sideways as he began to chant, and around him swung the indignant visible shadow of an invisible bird.
V
“You’re back, Doctor.”
“Yes, Doctor,” he said nervously, lumbering fast the door.
“Was your journey a success?” said the elder. “Did you hear a prescription from the witches of the Circling Wood?”
“Y—yes,” said the younger.
“Read it to me.”
The young man took the prescription slip from his inmost pocket and read what the witches had chanted, dancing around their cookfire as the bears stood meekly round:
“Vulture’s toes and viper’s bowels,
screeching eyes of screeching owls;
barracuda’s hidden tit,
hyena’s gender-cleaving clit,
eye of throat and heel of spleen,
lungs and knees and all between;
all the half-digested heart
claims for armor and for art.”
Behind the desk, the doctor steepled thoughtfully, his eyebrows prowling like melanistic jaguars.
“Well,” he said. “Did you sign the prescription?”
“I. . . I don’t understand it yet.”
The doctor sighed as he stood up and walked to the organ chart. He traced the edge of the vast triangle with a thoughtful cigar.
“The blood flows down the pyramid,” he said. “And so the gods return.” He spread his hands to convey that no further explanation was needed.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that can happen. I believe in a universal energy—”
“Energy? Energy!?” The doctor slammed his fist on the desk. “Bah! You’re no doctor of mine! You’re nothing but a son to me.”
The son shrank so small beneath his scorn, he did not even have to open the door to sidle backwards under it.
VI
The door bore my host’s coat of arms, supported by rampant pantheresses, and beneath it the motto Mangeons les morts.
Inside, the narrow room towered skyward, containing only a tall column of double portraits—my host’s family tree. From each, a husband and wife glowered imperiously, looking little different from generation to generation.
“Do you see that one?” said my host, pointing up. “These are my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. He died young, and she kept his heart in a jar for the remainder of her days. However, my father’s research suggests it may have been his liver by mistake.”
“How romantic!” I sighed.
He led me out of the tall gallery into a velvet parlor. On the marble coffee table sat a cupcake, pink and sparking with sprinkles.
“Do you want it? It is lacking in vital fire, but they print messages on the inside of the wrapper. You can read what the bakers teach, that all the doctors do not know.”
I put the cupcake in my mouth and it subsided pinkly down my throat. I spread the wrapper and read: We can relate to the pretty as the consumer, but to the beautiful only as the consumed.
“You see?” said my host, sitting next to me on the settee.
“I taste,” I answered, running a slow hand along his leg.
VII
She woke up all tits and furious longing.
She had dreamed about her childhood raven, Buryman, and she could not account for how wild she felt in the hot, dark room she woke to. She reached down through her cocoon of ruffles and felt at herself desperately, and she finished with a deep, booming roar that shook the walls and could be heard for miles.
She sloughed off her lace and bedding and stalked to her desk. She did not need a lamp to read what she had written earlier in her journal:
I saw my doppelgänger today in the bathroom mirror, and she was hot as hell. I haven’t eaten all day but I feel wonderful. I think I have died several times and the worms have become my food and not vice versa. When I have finished my brother’s gavage I will take a nap, with an ikon beneath my pillow…
She set the journal aside and slunk through the halls, lit only by the moonlight that gleamed here and there through cracks and arrow slits. She tasted the air as she walked and it was cold and delectable.
She opened the secret entrance with a blast of sudden organ music. She took her time descending the stairs, her thighs brushing slowly against each other.
The music swelled around her when she reached the bottom. Her brother looked up at her and the bags beneath his eyes sagged down like his distended belly.
“Brother,” she said. “I have come to eat your heart.”
He looked up into her eyes and trembled, shaking his chains. She smiled. He licked his lips.