Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Opening Epigraph

  Introduction: Sexing the Weird

  The Wolf Who Cried Girl

  The Bed of Appetite

  Subterraneus

  The Collector of Bones

  Beatification

  Untitled Grotesque

  Flotsam

  Concerning Attrition and Severance

  Rappaccini’s Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5)

  Unter den Augen des Mondes

  The Melusine (1898)

  Fecunditatem (Murder Ballad No. 6)

  I Am the Abyss, and I Am Light

  Dancing With the Eight of Swords

  Murder Ballad No. 7

  Lullaby of Partition and Reunion

  Derma Sutra (1891)

  The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade

  The Belated Burial

  The Bone’s Prayer

  A Canvas for Incoherent Arts

  The Peril of Liberated Objects, or The Voyeur’s Seduction

  Pickman’s Other Model (1929)

  At the Gate of Deeper Slumber

  Fish Bride (1970)

  “But She Also Lies Broken and Transformed”: An Afterword

  Closing Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Pour tons ceux que j’ai baisés un jour

  (au sens propre, au figuré, on autre).

  For Henry Darger and his beloved Vivian Girls

  Love is about craving for transformation. And all transformation, all movement, happens because life turns into death.

  Angus Fraser and Lynne Stopkewich,

  Kissed (1996)

  “Anyway, that’s the proper function of art, isn’t it?” I ask you. “To unsettle us?”

  Caitlín R. Kiernan,

  “Lullaby of Partition and Reunion” (2008)

  I cannot pretend that I felt any regret,

  Cause each broken heart will eventually mend,

  As the blood runs red down the needle and thread.

  “Someday you will be loved.”

  Death Cab For Cutie,

  “Someday You Will Be Loved” (2005)

  Introduction

  Sexing the Weird

  It’s the taste of sea spray, of salt dried on my lips. That precise taste, licked away hours after I’ve left the shore. And it’s swimming a hundred yards out from land, over water that grows deeper and deeper below you, and it’s having no idea what is moving about beneath you. It’s this frisson, that fleeting or prolonged shudder. Fear that is not only fear, but that is equal parts pleasure and awe. I suspect this is what some people mean when they say God, or god, or gods, but rarely do those words appeal to me. Rather, the bleached skeleton of a gull in the dunes, or the feel of greenbriers against my skin. Lying alone in a room so dark that my eyes have no hope of discerning any genuine light, and so begin to create their own desperate whirls and flickers. It’s the taste of my blood, or anyone else’s, a kiss becomes a nip, a razor opening the skin of my shoulder to expose the crimson sea that flows inside me. It’s the thought of being consumed, willingly or by some grim seduction, slowly becoming one with some other, consciousness preserved or lost to digestive dissolution. Let us entertain the thought that what I am trying to communicate could be summed up by saying, simply, imagine gripping daemonic horns, those of a ram or gazelle or some other member of the Antilopinae (oh, and Pan comes immediately to mind, that sacred, rutting son of gods), and then the thrust from without, from without to within, and all the impossible things that might follow.

  All these things are but the barest glimpse of what I mean when I speak of weird erotica, which comprises the bulk of the book in your hands. The intrusion—often by invitation—of the Outside into that most intimate and ancient act.

  And the Outside is the Unknown, and, as Love craft tells us (Lovecraft who only seems a prude until one realizes how preoccupied so many of his stories are with sex, very weird sex, indeed, no matter what dim view he took), “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” And what can be more unknown than Death? And what is Death but our penultimate encounter with the Unknown (despite those who choose to delude themselves, and so believe otherwise): And now, now, sex and death—recall the French phrase for the orgasm, la petite mort, the small death—and we are almost to the abovementioned moment of frisson. There is an association between sex and death that may be as old as the consciousness of human beings, or that may predate our species and have first been felt by our australopithecine forbearers. In our mind, and I would argue in any objective sense that may exist beyond our minds, sex and death are merely two sides of a coin. Better yet, yin yang, only seeming to exist in opposition, but all the while intimately interconnected. And oh this sounds so preposterously cliché I want to erase it and write something else. But, often, that which is cliché is so because it’s profoundly fucking true. Sex is the author of death, and without death, without the clearing away of old life, there will be no further sex. The Unknown begets the little death, granting that gift, then delivers it again into that “strongest kind of fear.”

  Undique enim ad inferos tantundem via est.

  And this one I walk does not deny the certainty of death, nor of life, nor of the Unknown, nor of the Outside, nor of the strongest kind of fear and the undeniable link between all these things. Integral. Intertwined. I’m following-and not necessarily by choice, excepting I’ve refused self-denial—the paths of Ovid, de Sade, Swinburne, von Sacher-Masoch, Crowley, Le Jardin des supplices, Mapplethorpe, Wilde, Dorian Cleavenger, Giger, and here there is suddenly great frustration at naming so many males, so add Sappho, Angela Carter, Dion Arhus, Octavia Butler, Patricia Piccinini’s parahumans, Kiki Smith, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Karen Finley, Charlotte Koche, Diamanda Galás, Anaïs Nin, and the perplexing mess that is Anne Rice. And I almost forgot Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. Yet few of these artists go even half far enough into the territories I’ve set myself to exploring. Oh, and I’m risking the insufferable pretension of name-dropping (bolstering the legitimacy of my work by making reference to more renowned artists), and how can I have named only one musician while I was at it?

  Ah, well.

  Well.

  It is a well, you know. I dip into it again and again and again. In my “real” life and in my fictions and in all the interstitial spaces bridging these. So, as one who draws deeply from that well, endlessly, I may fairly be accused of committing a confession via these introductory comments. Of covering my guard, baring my “soul.” Choose your apothegm. In Olden Days, the Recent Past, even into this enlightened Twenty-First Century A.D., and even tomorrow, I would be/have been/am labeled a pervert, indecent, a degenerate, polymorphously perverse, a sinner, a sicko, a pornographer, depraved, and debauched. And only for stating truths that others so frequently shy away from admitting. We paint and spin tales and sing all our fantasies, violating the fabric of decent, factual Reality at every turn. Human beings tear down the crushing weight of their life prisons and erect blasphemous surrogates, and I dare say blasphemous because, in times not so very far past, the tamest of fantasies were deemed unhealthy to the mind of man (especially the minds of the children of men; legal persecution against sellers of comic books and marga spring at first to mind, and, in the same vein, the de facto censorship of New York Magistrate Charles F. Murphy’s Comics Code Authority, and also Fredric Wortham’s Seduction of the Innocent). So, yes. I freely admit that I respond to myself, my highest power, and lock denial of desire outside (not to be mistaken with the Outside). As do all those other fantasists so m
uch less concerned with sex, or concerned not at all with sex, or even prudish in thinking themselves different from me not by degrees but by kind (to mangle the words of Charles Darwin, who gave me great insight into the mutability of flesh).

  I go to the well. My perverse well of words.

  I swim in those deep waters far from shore, not knowing what swims beneath me, and what might rise at any moment. Asa fantasist, I do this thing. I grip the horns of horned and rutting creatures.

  I do not allow my ears to be plugged with beeswax against the songs of sirens. I delight at restraint and the pricking of my skin and the act of restraining, and a thousand imaginary monstrous lovers, a dozen lashes and countless other tortures, mutations and transfigurations (of mind and body), welcome alien violations, negations of gender, and we might go on like this quite a terribly long time. I think not many writers of the weird have ventured into these warpings of the world (and, no, not for a moment, do I count as comrades those recently teeming writers of “paranormal romance” and “shifter fiction,” for rarely do they accomplish anything more dangerous than dressing the safe and normative up in wolf’s clothing; these authors, and their readers, are merely tourists). I think that, but I may well be wrong. And if so, I stand corrected, and would wish someone to point me to those authors. You’d be doing me a kindness.

  In exchange for my showing you the path down to the sea.

  Which I am about to do.

  Or, I should say, I am about to do again. IVe been doing this for years stacked upon years now, haven’t Ir It maybe I have cultivated an infamy, spawned an ill reputation, which I’d call an occupational hazard. For those who embrace the frisson, that fleeting or prolonged shudder. For those who show their darkest dreams and experiences to others (not to be mistaken with the Other), thereby opening themselves to accusations of corruption. But this is what fantasy does. Fantasy corrupts reality, as does dream. You can leave out all shameless mention genitals, the satyrs, of mermaids, of frog toes and tentacles, and fine, fine, fine, but this, I conclude, does not change a thing.

  Death and sex, these are among the cornerstones of reality.

  Pain and pleasure.

  Fear of the Unknown.

  Love of the Unknown, commingled with eros and philia. Desire without boundaries, no safe words, and I hardly care if this sort of thing is not for everybody. I steadfastly agree it’s for more than are willing to admit. But, the rest of you, take my hand, and let’s swim out past where our feet can touch the bottom.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  3 December 2011

  Providence, Rhode Island

  The Wolf Who Cried Girl

  She has lost count of exactly how many times winter and summer have traded places since the woman came upon her in the woods and took away her pelt. The woman also took her claws and her teeth and everything else that had made this girl a wolf. So complete was the theft that there are days now when she can hardly remember the way it was before, when she went about on four legs, instead of only two, when she had no need of words, but knew, instead, a near-infinite vocabulary of smells and tastes and subtler sounds than mere language can convey. She was sleeping when the woman found her, and the girl who was then a wolf dreamed of eyes the color of moss and spruce branches and dreamed, too, the sudden, wrenching pain of being divided from oneself. She awoke naked on the snow, truly naked for the first time in her life, and lay gasping beneath the watchful, star-stained sky as the green-eyed woman wrapped herself in stolen fur, then loped away into the night on another’s paws.

  In the morning, the girl’s pack found her shivering in a rocky place, and they snarled and bared their flings at the helpless, paleskinned thing the woman had left behind. They understood, in their dim and certain way, the crime that had transpired in the night, how it was that a wolf could lose its skin to a human being. Wolves have never needed religion to fear such demons, and they have never needed folktales to pass that fear from mother to cub. Confused and frightened and faintly mourning the loss of the wolf she had been, the pack skulked away and left her alone in the rocky place, though she cried out after them, fashioning ugly, aching noises with her new tongue and vocal cords. They ignored her pleas for help, unable to recognize them as such and too afraid that the demon might come back for yet another change of skin.

  Later in the day, having grown somewhat bolder, the wolves permitted her to take a few mouthfuls from a half-frozen elk carcass. And while she struggled to chew the meat with jaws wholly insufficient to the task, the pack sniffed her ass and licked at her sex, trying to discover some vestige of her former self. But they only succeeded in recalling the fullness of their fear, and soon they had nothing for the naked girl but bristling coats and black lips curled back to expose threatful, nipping incisors and canines. And so she left them, forever, and wandered down from the mountains and forests to the steel and glass and concrete city of men.

  For a time, the girl was made to live in cages, of one sort or another, and she was given pills and pricked with needles that made it even more difficult to remember what she had once been. She was forced into the peculiar, ill-fitting, mismatched pelts men and women wear because they long ago forgot how to grow their own. She was taught to bathe in soapy, hot water, because all the scents of her body had become shameful and offensive. With every passing day, she was, bit by bit, more a human girl and less the wolf she’d been born. And when she at last stopped biting and howling, when she had learned a few words, and how to dress herself, and that there was only one proper place to piss and defecate, she was turned out of the cages and hospital beds and back into the streets.

  In this city, here in the lee of the mountains, she lives off whatever scraps she finds discarded and rotting in trashcans and dumpsters. Sometimes, she’s lucky and catches a stray cat, or a rat, or a pigeon, the city’s stingy wildlife, and so there’s meat that has not been charred or boiled. There’s warm blood and bones to crack open for their marrow. She sleeps in the empty concrete and brick shells of abandoned or disused buildings, of which there is no shortage. She does her best to stay clear of all the other women and men who have been driven away from the vast, murmuring pack of humanity, the ragged castaways whom the girl at first mistook for other wolves robbed of their true shapes by other demons. But she has long-since learned her mistake, and they are almost always as wary of her as are the rest. Perhaps, she thinks, the outsider’s senses are somewhat keener than those of the ones who live always inside their neatly stacked cages and their rolling, roaring caves, and who constantly scrub at themselves, dulling their noses and ears and eyes with perfume and noise.

  She was born a wolf, and even now there is some lingering shred of her lupine birth that the shape-stealing demon and the city people have not managed to pry from her. She is certain that they would have, if they could only have found it, if they’d suspected there was anything left to take from her. She imagines that shred is like some small burrowing animal, dug in too deeply for even the most determined claws to ever extract from the sanctuary of its hole. But it is enough that there are nights when she finds her way up rickety fire escapes or deserted stairwells to the rooftops where she has only the omnipresent glare of electric lights to half obscure the moon and stars and the far-away mountains. If she is sure no one is watching her, that she is alone with the sky and the horizon, then she strips away all the filthy, alien raiments from her body and squats naked on tin and masonry and tar-shingle. She goes down on all fours again, though her anatomy is no longer suited to a quadruped’s gait.

  She throws back her head, matted ginger tresses falling away to reveal bright eyes like moss and spruce boughs, and the cry that escapes her throat is not a howl so much as it is a wordless, keening threnody. It is the nearest thing to a howl of which she is now capable, and hearing such a strange and utterly inconsolable ululation, the men and women and children of the city lie awake in their beds, listening, breathlessly waiting to see if the cry will come again and maybe nearer than before, m
aybe right outside their windows. The girl who was a wolf wails her sorrow at the moon, and, in that instant, all those who hear her cry flinch or cringe or shut their eyes tight as the refuge of civilization seems suddenly to melt away around them. All it once, the Pleistocene was only yesterday, at best, and will surely come again tomorrow. Ancient, unconscious memories buried a million years in the deepest neocortical convolutions lurch slowly towards recognition. Shades are drawn and locks are double and triple checked; countless fretful dreams of humdrum inconvenience and workaday disaster are traded for nightmares of running in dark places and hungry red eyes and gnashing saber teeth. And maybe in the morning, there will be a rash of phone calls to the police and animal control and to anyone else who might help to reassert the promises of this modern century and remind these people when and where they are. Hearing the girl, a pious few mutter prayers, but they pray to a fatherly god of light and love and justice, a god of right and wrong, for men no longer recall the names of those dark, amoral spirits who once were summoned to stand between firelight and slavering jaw’s.

  On the rooftop, the green-eyed, ginger-haired girl, who was not born a girl of any sort, rocks back on her naked haunches, and she barks and yowls until her throat has gone raw and there are only tears. She wets herself and moans and scratches in vain at her own body with short, brittle fingernails, as though she might tear away this obscuring flesh and discover her true form secreted just underneath. There will be bruises and scabby welts in the morning, but her clothes will hide most of them, and hardly anyone ever pauses to consider the wounds the city’s dispossessed inflict upon themselves. Finally, exhausted and trembling, she finds some place out of the worst of the wind and curls up thereto wait for daylight. Drifting in and out of wakefulness, she has her own sour dreams to contend with.