“Don’t disappoint me. I can be very, very dangerous.”
She whispered her threat into my right ear, the one without the transmitter. Her velvet adder’s tongue caressed my earlobe with each syllable.
My father used to call me – as a term of endearment, believe it or not – his “blood virgin”. No matter how many killers’ confessions I transcribed, he refused to admit that I could be intimate with blood. He believed that some membrane lay across the psyche that kept the innocent from understanding violent crimes. Breaking that membrane didn’t necessarily require killing another person; my father had never broken a law in his life, but he was the high priest of murder. Maybe the rupture came with a flash of insight, a glimpse into the locked chamber. As long as I played deaf, dumb and blind, my moral hymen stayed intact. It wasn’t until I entered my father’s chamber that the wall of my cell burst, and I saw what murder was: a miracle of transubstantiation, performed in reverse.
I searched the online databases for killers who matched the black-haired woman’s description, but I couldn’t find anyone like her.
“What did she say her name was?” my father asked.
“She didn’t.”
“You mean you didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“When are you going to meet her?”
“I don’t think I want to.”
I pressed my fingertips to my temples. Inside my skull I felt the pulse of my father’s curiosity. Or was it envy, that insistent throb behind his concern?
“Never break an appointment with a murderer who wants to confess. Go talk to her.”
My father, Pontius Pilate. He was pushing me towards the chasm of this murderer’s desire to explain herself, and he didn’t seem to care that I was about to fall. He usually hated to let me leave his castle. I was his Easter lily, his unsullied symbol of eternal life. Now he was urging me out into the night, to meet this seductress who claimed to be a murderer.
I finally gave in.
That night I dined alone, as usual. I couldn’t stop thinking about the satin clutch of the murderer’s lips, or the pressure of her breasts against mine. Her pebble-hard nipples had left two sore spots on my chest. Every few minutes I would touch one of those tender places, and the room around me would dissolve in a mist of desire. I could hardly swallow my food. When I tried to chew a bite of meat, the flesh tasted of cunt and Easter lilies.
I didn’t have anything to wear to a club. My own clothes were drab, penitential. I searched the castle’s guest rooms, looking for some sultry gown that a female visitor might have left behind. My father often hosted murderers in our home while he interviewed them, as if his hospitality were critical to their absolution.
In a tiny bedroom in the east wing I found what I was looking for. Years ago, a murderer had stayed in that room. The woman had bludgeoned her father to death in his private study. Afterwards, she drained some of his blood into a chalice and left the cup on a pedestal in her father’s sanctuary. Her father continued to communicate with her after his death, speaking to her through the enchanted chalice.
“Blood speaks to blood,” the murderer explained. My father showed a strange affection for this monster. He offered her our finest guest quarters, but she insisted on staying in that cramped cell. Knowing she was bound for prison, the murderer had left behind a closetful of evening dresses and shoes. Sequins and beads glittered on black velvet sheaths; iridescent feathers adorned the hems of floor-length satin gowns. I didn’t think those seductive clothes would fit, but they slipped over my body as if they had been made for me.
I chose a red satin dress, slit to the spine. I wore it with black seamed stockings and stiletto pumps, wicked grace notes on my feet. As I stared at my reflection, I felt the murderer’s spirit stealing through my body.
Pale throat and breasts glowed against the crimson.
Fragrance of lilies, cunt-sugar and crimson.
How could I be a virgin, when I looked like this?
My father keeps a distance from his guests, to protect his spiritual hygiene. None of them has ever seen him, though many have tried to push through the scrim that hides him from the world. He sits behind his curtain like the sacramental host while, on the other side, his guests hunger for him. His compassion keeps him separate from the accused. The murderers envy me, living so close to my father. In their fantasies I have an open audience with the wise judge, who listens to my confessions with loving tolerance and absolves me with a gentle touch.
My father once told me that all of their confessions arose from the same crime, and that those crimes originated with lust. Desire was dangerous – a threat to the cohesion of the mind. But my father left me with something more dangerous than desire. Rage demands a consummation of its own, an orgasm turned inside-out. The censors will never let you read this, and my father would hate to hear me use such vulgar language, but I’ve come to believe that murder is an inverted fuck.
My father’s guards escorted me across the lake. A car met us in the city. As soon as the driver opened my door, I dashed for the club. Sheltered by the crowd, I yanked the transmitter out of my ear and let it fall on the floor with the spilled drinks and cigarette butts.
The club had more rooms than my father’s house. Caverns led into cubbyholes, which lengthened into hallways that opened into chapels, and the entire structure – walls, floors, elaborately moulded ceilings – throbbed with a feverish percussion. Soon my pulse was keeping time with the electronic drums, and the rooms I explored felt as intimate as the chambers of my heart. The revellers were lost in their own obsessions. A man struck matches on his lover’s shimmering tits. His tongue sizzled on her flesh. A line of people waited to have letters carved into their bellies and breasts, asses and thighs. By the end of the night, the letters would form a poem.
Did my father know that places like this existed? Probably, but he never would have let me come here. Outside my father’s house, hordes of lovers had been meeting for these cherished private games, while he had kept me locked in his castle.
I stopped in front of a stone grotto. Against one of the outcroppings, a woman braced her nude body, her legs wrapped around her lover’s waist. His hips joined hers in an urgent undulation, his long black hair swinging in time to his thrusts. As his strokes quickened, her fingers raked purple streaks into his skin. Her moans melted into the cacophony around her, but I could see her lips repeatedly forming a single word: Please.
This was a raw ritual compared to the elaborate games I’d seen tonight, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The black pendulum of the man’s hair measured the hours I’d spent alone, imagining this scene. The woman’s flushed throat was mine, and her hot mouth was mine, and the brutal grinding of her flesh and bones into the stone was mine. With his hard cock, her lover was battering the buried atom of her isolation; when he smashed it, she would come into being like a newborn star.
Now I knew what my father had been afraid of.
Jagged laughter tore my reverie. The murderer grabbed my hand and spun me around. My skirt rippled like a blood pool.
“Beautiful!” she shouted over the din.
The murderer wore a black mini skirt and cropped T-shirt, so short that its hem skimmed the underswell of her breasts. Written on the shirt in glittery script were the words FUCK US ALL.
“The interview!” I cried. “Where can we have the interview?”
Her forked tongue swept across her lips. That lewd promise was her only reply.
The murderer led me out of the club through a door that opened into a warped funnel of blackness. She dragged me through a passageway under the city, into the echoing sewers that spread under my father’s lake. She knew every turn by heart, as if she had spent her whole life in the subterranean tunnels of my world.