Penny Dreadful

  But I trembled you, she said.

  Uh, I said. Not well enough, I guess.

  I had her face in my hands and it was ridiculously soft. She had perfect skin and edible lips and now I was not sure what I wanted to do.

  You have really nice skin, I said.

  Griffin spat. Jesus, Ray.

  The girl was staring into my eyes like I was a mannequin. I assumed she was still trying to tremble me, whatever that meant. I let my hands slip to her throat and she rolled her eyes. Impatient, bored. Not afraid.

  Are you afraid? I said.

  No, she said.

  Griffin began to whistle. Raindrops keep falling on my head.

  I could hurt you, I said.

  The girl shrugged, as if that was very doubtful. A tangible chunk of silence. Then I told her to open her mouth and for a long perilous moment thought that surely she would resist, that she would tell me to fuck off and the spell would break. The moment would shatter like ice. But then she parted her lips.

  Tom and Ray, with Phineas:

  Oh, brother did he need some love and understanding. This situation was not completely fucked but it was pretty well fucked. Major Tom was worried, very worried and for the first time in recent memory he was suffering an unwanted and completely unforeseen outburst of moisture beneath his armpits.

  They had retired to a gas station restroom to clean up and discuss the matter behind a locked door. Tom stood before one of three mirrors, straightening his clothes with brittle fingers and washing the Fred’s blood and snot from his hands and face. Ray Fine sat on a toilet with his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. Tom was sweating because he had perhaps mistakenly lured an outsider into the game who, God knows why, did not want to be a Mariner’s apprentice and worse, was too mentally competent to be cast among the hapless Freds. Otherwise, Tom would happily say fuck you, Fred. Have a nice life in the sewers and be careful with your tongue.

  You have a problem, said Tom.

  Oh? said Ray, as he blew a wobbling smoke ring.

  I can only protect you if you’re my apprentice.

  Ray Fine laughed out loud, the insolent toad.

  I’m not joking around, Ray.

  What the fuck. Are you gonna protect me from girls who want to French kiss me?

  Oh, that’s rich. That’s a killer.

  It’s a gift, said Ray. I make people laugh.

  Tom wet a paper towel and used it to cool off his skull, watching Ray very closely in the mirror and noticing that while the old boy was making a lot of smart-ass comments, he was looking pale as a ghost.

  How was it, by the way?

  How was what?

  The Trembler, said Tom. Didn’t you take her tongue?

  Ray shifted his ass around on the toilet and stared back at him. He wasn’t so funny now.

  Did you bite her tongue?

  Maybe, he said. What about it?

  Blood. Did you draw blood?

  There was a little blood, yeah. Ray flicked his cigarette at one of the sinks.

  Tom gave a shadow of a smile. And how was it, Ray?

  The sound of water dripping. Ray got up and wandered to the sinks, his blue eyes ghostly and vague. He was clearly drawn to the mirror and seemed to hate his own face at the same time. Tom watched him take one long, reluctant look in the glass and force his eyes away. Then back again.

  Fuck me, said Ray Fine. That is an ugly hat.

  He could still taste the girl’s tongue, the Trembler’s. Her blood had been warm and thick and good. And he had felt something he had never expected. He had felt safe.

  And how was it, Ray?

  The sound of water dripping. He felt dizzy and vague and he wished Griffin would stop calling him Ray. He got up and moved over to the sink, thinking he might wash his hands but there was his pale fucking face in the mirror, floating like a dead thing in still water. He looked like a paper target sometimes. All he needed were black circles around his torso and bloodless tears in the white. Who are you, who are you today. Who do you want to be. He looked away, then back. He was afraid his eyes would be trapped in the mirror.

  Fuck me, he said. That is an ugly hat.

  He looked away, at a crack in the wall. A long, narrow crack and he flashed to the idle childhood notion that a microscopic universe might well exist in that crack in the wall of a much larger restroom, that there were infinite cracks in the walls of infinite restrooms and here we go, he thought. Here we fucking go. Ray Fine slapped at the electric hand dryer and the white noise snapped him out of it and he found himself staring hard at Major Tom, who stared back without smiling, without breathing. A fat black cockroach scurried out of the dark and Ray heard the crunch of its hard little exoskeleton shattering under Tom’s boot heel. The electric dryer died now and they dropped their eyes at once.

  It was…very intense, said Ray. It was blinding.

  Whoa, said Tom. I guess you’re fucked. Have a nice life in the sewer.

  Wait a minute.

  You’re in, man. You’re in the game.

  Ray stared at him. What is the fucking game?

  The tongue is the game, said Tom. The game is tongues.

  But isn’t there some higher purpose to the game?

  Ray was now standing a pubic hair too close to him and Tom felt himself getting edgy, very fucking edgy and he wondered what he wouldn’t do for a shot of the Pale and some more attractive surroundings.

  What sort of higher purpose, said Tom. He felt like his face was dripping.

  Like a quest, said Ray. A noble quest.

  Tom stared at him.

  You know, said Ray. You could return the magic beans to the Fairy Queen. You could save Christmas. Something along those lines.

  Why do you want to insult me, Ray?

  Ray appeared to chew at the inside of his mouth and Tom shivered, watching him. He looked away and began to turn the hot water on and off, on and off. Then left it on and held his finger under the stream for as long as he could stand it.

  I want you to stop calling me Ray, said Ray.

  The tongue is the quest, Tom said softly. And I’m sorry. Your name is Ray.

  And so that’s it? said Ray. You…you’re like a rapist, man.

  Tom removed the damp towel from his head and regarded Ray with contempt. He had heard this morbid line of thought before, from soft and puny players of other castes. The Breathers, for instance. He told himself to be patient, to choose his words with great care.

  The tongue is a powerful muscle, he said. A thing of beauty. And at the same time, it’s weak. The tongue is soft and private and terribly vulnerable, like the genitals.

  Unwanted intimacy, said Ray. There’s nothing more terrifying, is there?

  There’s Elvis, said Griffin.

  Oh, yeah. Elvis, said Ray. And what the hell does that mean, exactly.

  Griffin laughed. To go see Elvis, he said. To die but not die.

  Elvis is an imaginary death, said Ray. He nodded. I can live with that.

  The taking of tongues is ultimately an act of compassion, said Tom.

  Ray laughed. How’s that?

  Tom leaned close to him, hissing like a woman despite himself. If your tongue is between my teeth, then it’s mine to sever. To eat. But I don’t.

  Why not? said Ray.

  Because I’m enlightened.

  Now you’re a Buddhist, said Ray. This gets better and better.

  And what did you do to that girl, the Trembler?

  Ray frowned and sullenly twisted his head from side to side until the joints in his neck popped. He took off the hideous fedora and dropped it to the floor. He ran one hand through his matted blond hair, staring at himself in the mirror and finally Tom saw what he saw.

  The face of another. One who was not Phineas, was not Ray.

  Phineas began to cough, great hacking coughs that would rip him in two. He felt sick and he found himself wondering what Griffin’s tongue would taste like. Fuck fuck fuck. He cast his eyes away, at the crack in the wall w
here another tiny shadow of himself was possibly having a better time. He took off the fedora suddenly and dropped it to the floor. He ran one cold skeletal hand through his hair and glared at himself in the mirror.

  That chick wanted to kiss me, he said.

  You are so hopelessly hetero, said Griffin.

  Oh, really. Phineas smiled. That’s odd. Because I’m thinking of your tongue right now. I’m wondering how sweet your breath might be, how your lips would be warm and cold at once.

  Ah, yes. I think you will have a future as a Redeemer, said Griffin. The taking of tongues by way of sympathy and charm.

  Whatever, man. What sort of thrill do you get from torturing some fucked-up kids?

  Griffin rolled his eyes. The Freds are my daily bread. If I want a thrill, then I hunt another Mariner.

  I could be a Trembler. I trembled that girl, said Phineas.

  A fascinating idea, said Griffin. The male Tremblers do not lead such happy lives, I’m afraid. They are hunted ruthlessly by everyone, and soon they are left with no tongue at all.

  Fuck it, then. You can just call me Fred. Or Freddie.

  Griffin bent and picked up the fallen hat. He held it between two fingers as if it were a dead thing.

  You dropped your hat, Ray.

  Motherfucker, thought Phineas. Or did he say that aloud.

  He was starting to hate the name Ray, he really was. But he reluctantly took the hat from Griffin.

  Thanks, he said. It’s not really my hat.

  I promise you, said Griffin. You will regret this.

  Whatever. Phineas put on the hat and shivered. He was Ray, though. He was Ray Fine. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the mirror and said, do you think you could take my tongue?

  Now? said Griffin.

  Phineas shrugged. Why not.

  The sound of water dripping and they stared at each other for a long waxing moment and in a crack in the wall their microscopic shadows likewise stared at each other and Phineas was confident that his little shadowself would soon pin the shadow Griffin to the floor like a wriggling bug and maybe just rip out his tongue.

  Mingus:

  He was afraid of Chrome, very afraid. And he wasn’t sure the women appreciated that. His poor brain hurt, all the time now. The game was too much for him. It had been days and days since he had slipped outside of it and it was like he could never sleep. He wasn’t tired, exactly. But he might be losing his mind. He was beginning to understand that it was dangerous to stay in character all the time. He could not quite remember where he lived, for instance. And he had been fairly shocked to think of that genetics exam, to remember it at all.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to take the test. Doubtful that he would be able to comprehend the thing at all. The last time he had been to school he had found himself in a microbiology lab with a lot of frightening equipment that he no longer knew how to manipulate. The air had been thin and sterile, with a hateful undertow of chemicals.

  Sometimes, though. It might be nice to visit his previous world.

  His daylight self made him uncomfortable, however. His name was unimportant but he was a paranoid and sexually nervous computer yuppie who was failing out of med school with alarming speed and grace. He was just over five feet tall and he weighed 110 pounds when wet. He got by with shaving once a month and he had a sticky relationship with his mother. He was boring. He spent most of his time online, cruising the web and playing Doom. He was technically still married, but he and his wife were estranged and she had rarely bothered to sleep with him anyway. It was not a world that he wanted to rush back to, exactly. But sometimes he was curious to see if it had changed at all.

  Dizzy’s house made him feel safe, though. Familiar and strange, the memories were muted, like beasts held underwater. She kept a lot of candles burning and everything smelled of trees and he saw nothing but soft edges and shadowy landscapes. He sat in a leather chair, barefoot. He worried about Chrome, about what he would say or do if he knew Mingus had betrayed him. He sat with his arms crossed, staring straight ahead. In another hour or two, it would be midnight. It would be time to go out and play. He wondered if he could sit without moving until then, he wondered if he could stop his own breathing.

  Goo had gone already.

  She had been pacing around ever since he told her that Chrome was a madman. She had been smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying to hide the fact that she had slipped into her Eve persona and failing badly, he had thought. And maybe he should have followed her, he should have kept an eye on her. But she had given him a dirty look when he suggested it. It was funny, really. But little Eve was even more fearless than Goo. Anyhow. She was performing later and had likely gone ahead to prepare.

  Change in temperature and the smell of Dizzy Bloom came around a corner. It was an unidentified spice, a color he had never seen. And before he could give it a thorough ponder, she was crouched before him with sweet glowing skin and brief sharp smile and long dark hair falling loose and he felt himself get a little warm. Females rarely came this close to him. He smiled, wondering what she wanted.

  Are you okay, she said.

  Not so bad. I’m worried, of course.

  You’re adorable, she said.

  What?

  Her hands floated to touch his thighs and his breath stopped. His breath shut down pretty efficiently. Dizzy Bloom ran her fingers up to his hips, tugging at his pockets. His brain was gone, long gone. And he let himself slide out of the chair to kneel before her as she stroked his face and whispered to him, kissed him.

  Incredible.

  Mingus wouldn’t have believed another person’s lips could be so soft. Dizzy offered him her tongue and he touched it lightly with his own. The room flickered around him as if the house was unstable. Dizzy Bloom shrugged out of her leather jerkin and now her little round breasts were in his cold hands and he felt something like nervous glee, pure shivering foolish glee. And when she slipped his trousers down and exposed his short thick penis to the naked air and lifted her skirt and moved to lower herself onto his lap and gently very gently helped him find his way inside her, well at this point he pretty much blacked out.

  Concrete and barbed wire, concrete and barbed wire and I was trying to remember the words to this obscure country song that Jude used to sing when she was washing her hair or painting her nails, something about concrete and barbed wire and how the average state prison was an easily penetrated fortress compared to the human heart.

  It was a country song, okay. I didn’t say it was poetry.

  Griffin or Major Tom was pretty bent on calling me Ray Fine and that was cool. I could walk and talk like Ray. I could be Ray Fine. I had created the poor stuttering bastard, hadn’t I? I had purchased Ray’s sad clothes and this moldy hat and even perfected the way he limped. Ray was my idea.

  Good night, Phineas. I will most likely kill you in the morning.

  Dear Jude.

  It appeals to me, of course. The shadow world. The ability to slip in and out of the real. A fanciful subterrain where the lord of the rings and bladerunner become one and I can be a mad dwarf for a day, a thief or an assassin. I can be a mercenary with a soft spot for razorgirls and I daydream about this shit all the time, don’t you?

  When I was fifteen or so it was Dungeons & Dragons. A few of my friends had a game that ran for what seemed like forever and we gathered every weekend to play without stopping. We used Mountain Dew and nicotine for fuel because the Dungeon Master was kind of a fascist about drugs. We blacked out the windows but it didn’t matter. At sunrise the game always lost its legs. My character was a thief, a halfblood elf named Grim. Don’t remember his vital statistics exactly. Dexterity off the chart. Strength and charisma well above average and I wasn’t bad looking. No magic skills, though. And I was no good at languages. What else. I was of questionable birth and not terribly stable. And my ethical designation was chaotic/good, which meant I would probably save a young maiden from a pack of orcs but maybe not. There were no promises
and you wouldn’t want to turn your back on me. I was a thief, after all.

  I used to dream of Grim. In my sleep I was Grim. And even years later, long after the game was done, I dreamed of him.

  It’s easy. You stagger a hundred years forward, a thousand years back. You manufacture a world where the apocalypse has failed to manifest. Urban purgatory. The sun is a joke, a bad memory. The world is dark and wet and waiting to be fucked. The world is a great big pussy. Everything is sex and chaos. Rapidly shrinking human population due to HIV, ebola, mad cow disease. Whatever. The political elite live in orbiting space stations. Mutants born daily. DNA experiments gone wrong. Vampires and goblins. Elves. Werewolves. Androids and common humans. Cyber and weapon technology is at a standstill. Corporations are controlled by artificial intelligence. Evolutionary regression. Past and future merge, or blur. People ride camels and horses alongside landskimmers and hovercrafts. Traveling circus troupes wander nuclear wasteland. The road warrior model. Freak shows, blood sports, theaters of cruelty. Public executions and snuff films dominate the airwaves and pornography is common currency, etc.

  Then again, I doubt you would need to daydream. This is pretty much the way you see things on a good day, isn’t it?

  Major Tom:

  Convenience, he thought. Artificial light that made the skin look pasty and green and aisles swollen with bright, fascist packaging. Convenience. Oh, dear. That was rich. That was a regular killer. He stared down at himself from a big curved mirror overhead and tried unsuccessfully not to giggle. Shoplifters in the mirror may be closer than they appear and whoever had dreamed up the phrase “convenience store” was a born torturer.

  Tom found himself staring at a long, tubular orange product mysteriously called “Pringles” and his mind began a bitter rhyming game: tingles jingles mingles shingles and what in hell was he looking for? The clerk was staring at him with bright green frog eyes and Ray was waiting outside. Ray, who refused to play the game.

  Mouthwash.

  Of course. He was on the wrong aisle, clearly. These products were all in the snack family. They were heavy with fat and starches and red dye #2, yellow dye #6. He needed the medicinal aisle, the cleaning creams and powders. He wanted some of that cool blue mouthwash. His tongue was a bit chalky, his tongue was sore and putrid from the mouth of that Fred by the creek and he suddenly wished he had taken a taste of that adorable Trembler. But Ray was a friend, he was a dear old friend and Tom had graciously let him have her without muscling in for even a nibble.