Ellen looked down, and saw me looking up at her. She frowned, and tilted her head to one side. For just a second, there was something undeniably predatory in that expression, something murderous. All spite and not a jot of mercy. For that second, I was face to face with the one quarter of her bloodline that changed all the rules, the ancestor she hadn’t wanted to talk about. But then that second passed, and she softly whispered, “I have a plan, Natalie Beaumont.”
“What are you doing?” I asked her. But my mouth was so dry and numb, my throat so parched, it felt like I took forever to cajole my tongue into shaping those four simple words.
“No one will know,” she said. “I promise. Not Harpootlian, not Szabó, not anyone. I’ve been over this a thousand times, worked all the angles.” And she went down on one knee then, leaning over me. “But you’re supposed to be asleep, Nat.”
“Ellen, you don’t cross Harpootlian,” I croaked.
“Trust me,” she said.
In that place, the two of us adrift on an island of light in an endless sea of blackness, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was down now, and I reached up, brushing it back from her face. When my fingers moved across her scalp, I found two stubby horns, but it wasn’t anything a girl couldn’t hide with the right hairdo and a hat.
“Ellen, what are you doing?”
“I’m about to give you a gift, Nat. The most exquisite gift in all creation. A gift that even the angels might covet. You wanted to know what the unicorn does. Well, I’m not going to tell you; I’m going to show you.”
She put a hand between my legs and found I was already wet.
I licked at my chapped lips, fumbling for words that wouldn’t come. Maybe I didn’t know what she was getting at, this gift, but I had a feeling I didn’t want any part of it, no matter how exquisite it might be. I knew these things, clear as day, but I was lost in the beauty of her, and whatever protests I might have uttered, they were about as sincere as ol’ Brer Rabbit begging Brer Fox not to throw him into that briar patch. I could say I was bewitched, but it would be a lie.
She mounted me then, and I didn’t argue.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Now I fuck you,” she replied. “Then I’m going to talk to my grandmother.” And, with that, the world fell out from beneath me again. And the ginger-skinned eunuch moved along to the next tableau, that next set of memories I couldn’t recollect on my own . . .
. . . Stars were tumbling from the skies. Not a few stray shooting stars here and there. No, all the stars were falling. One by one, at first, and then the sky was raining pitchforks, only it wasn’t rain, see. It was light. The whole sorry world was being born or was dying, and I saw it didn’t much matter which. Go back far enough, or far enough forward, the past and future wind up holding hands, cozy as a couple of lovebirds. Ellen had thrown open a doorway, and she’d dragged me along for the ride. I was so cold. I couldn’t understand how there could be that much fire in the sky, and me still be freezing my tits off like that. I lay there shivering as the brittle vault of heaven collapsed. I could feel her inside me. I could feel it inside me, and same as I’d been lost in Ellen’s beauty, I was being smothered by that ecstasy. And then . . . then the eunuch showed me the gift, which I’d forgotten . . . and which I would immediately forget again.
How do you write about something, when all that remains of it is the faintest of impressions of glory? When all you can bring to mind is the empty place where a memory ought to be and isn’t, and only that conspicuous absence is there to remind you of what cannot ever be recalled? Strain as you might, all that effort hardly adds up to a trip for biscuits. So, how do you write it down? You don’t, that’s how. You do your damnedest to think about what came next, instead, knowing your sanity hangs in the balance.
So, here’s what came after the gift, since le godemiché maudit is a goddamn Indian giver if ever one was born. Here’s the curse that rides shotgun on the gift, as impossible to obliterate from reminiscence as the other is to awaken.
There were falling stars, and that unendurable cold . . . and then the empty, aching socket to mark the countermanded gift . . . and then I saw the unicorn. I don’t mean the dingus. I mean the living creature, standing in a glade of cedars, bathed in clean sunlight and radiating a light all its own. It didn’t look much like what you see in storybooks or those medieval tapestries they got hanging in the Cloisters. It also didn’t look much like the beast carved into the lid of Fong’s wooden box. But I knew what it was, all the same.
A naked girl stood before it, and the unicorn kneeled at her feet. She sat down, and it rested its head on her lap. She whispered reassurances I couldn’t hear, because they were spoken as softly as falling snow. And then she offered the unicorn one of her breasts, and I watched as it suckled. This scene of chastity and absolute peace lasted maybe a minute, maybe two, before the trap was sprung and the hunters stepped out from the shadows of the cedar boughs. They killed the unicorn, with cold iron lances and swords, but first the unicorn killed the virgin who’d betrayed it to its doom . . .
. . . And Harpootlian’s ginger eunuch turned another page (a hamfisted analogy if ever there was one, but it works for me), and we were back in the black room. Ellen and me. Only two of the candles were still burning, two guttering, halfhearted counterpoints to all that darkness. The other three had been snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind that had smelled of rust, sulfur, and slaughterhouse floors. I could hear Ellen crying, weeping somewhere in the darkness beyond the candles and the periphery of her protective circle. I rolled over onto my right side, still shivering, still so cold I couldn’t imagine being warm ever again. I stared into the black, blinking and dimly amazed that my eyelids hadn’t frozen shut. Then something snapped into focus, and there she was, cowering on her hands and knees, a tattered rag of a woman lost in the gloom. I could see her stunted, twitching tail, hardly as long as my middle finger, and the thing from the box was still strapped to her crotch. Only now it had a twin, clutched tightly in her left hand.
I think I must have asked her what the hell she’d done, though I had a pretty good idea. She turned toward me, and her eyes . . . Well, you see that sort of pain, and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget you saw it.
“I didn’t understand,” she said, still sobbing. “I didn’t understand she’d take so much of me away.”
A bitter wave of conflicting, irreconcilable emotion surged and boiled about inside me. Yeah, I knew what she’d done to me, and I knew I’d been used for something unspeakable. I knew violation was too tame a word for it, and that I’d been marked forever by this gold-digging half-breed of a twist. And part of me was determined to drag her kicking and screaming to Harpootlian. Or fuck it, I could kill her myself, and take my own sweet time doing so. I could kill her the way the hunters had murdered the unicorn. But—on the other hand—the woman I saw lying there before me was shattered almost beyond recognition. There’d been a steep price for her trespass, and she’d paid it and then some. Besides, I was learning fast that when you’ve been to Hades’s doorstep with someone, and the two of you make it back more or less alive, there’s a bond, whether you want it or not. So, there we were, a cheap, latter-day parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, and all I could think about was holding her, tight as I could, until she stopped crying and I was warm again.