Read The Cipher Online

Authors: Kathe Koja

Tags: #Fantasy, #Horror, #Fiction, #Urban Fantasy

The Cipher (3 page)

"Stop playing with yourself," I told her, "it's not worth it."

When the wine was gone I made her leave; she didn't want to but she did want to show me the bugs. We drove to a coffee shop down the street from Club 22, she had to be to work later, sat in an orange laminate booth and drank coffee worse than the wine, her spindly legs jittering, insect dance; I tried not to think that.

"Runes," she said.

"Runes my ass. What do you mean, runes?"

"I'm serious. I think they're some kind of language."

I had had somewhat the same idea, but hearing her say it pissed me off, made me somehow nervous too; Nakota's notions had taken me places that I had never dreamed of going, but the places were rarely good ones. "You've been reading too much Weekly World News," I said, looking down into my cup. " 'Giant Baby Born to Dead Man/ all that shit."

Like handling filigree, fresh plastic parting to show me her remnant pets, and "Come on, not here," and she ignored me, and again I looked. This time I saw the beauty, if there is beauty in death, little weird corpses I didn't want to touch.

"Can't you see them? Look," her stubby chewed nail a breath above one wing, slow limn of its traceries. "Look at that."

"Greek to me," I said, as coldly as I could, sitting deliberately back, the booth my temporary limit. "Maybe it helps to be crazy," but it was really no use, and a small part of me even enjoyed seeing that shine to her again, a glow like the makeup I knew she never wore, her hands gentle as a mother's as she put them back, musing tilt as she lifted the coffee cup in those newly nurturing hands.

"I thought, what about a mouse," she said.

At first I didn't understand, then when I did felt sick. "Oh come
on,
" pushing my own cup away, "aren't the bugs bad enough? How gross do you want to get, anyway?"

"Who're you, the Humane Society? It would just be a fucking
mouse,
Nicholas."

She was serious. The mad scientist. And a part of me wondered, too, with an ugly curiosity, just what might happen to one of our furry friends dangled down that gaping blackness, what it might look like if it survived the trip; watch that first step, it's an asskicker. My wonder drove me out of the booth, to sit grimly in the car while she finished—and she took her fucking time about it, you may be sure—and I said nothing until we sat idling outside Club 22, rhythmic slow cough of the exhaust, desultory rain on the windshield and reggae very softly on the radio.

"Come on, Nakota," and I touched her, something I rarely did anymore, my fingers as gentle on her wrist as hers had been on the insects. "You don't really want to do that, do you? Do you?"

Swiveling on the seat, hair swinging with the motion, mouth small and meaner than I had ever seen it: "You're so stupid, Nicholas. You'll always be stupid, and you know why? Do you want to know why you'll always be stupid? It's because you're afraid to be anything but." She didn't bang the door—she had never been a door slammer—but I drove away as if she had.

No call, nothing, for two, three days. Fine. I could live the rest of my life without seeing what happens to a mouse when it kisses death, especially weird death; but her words hurt me, irritated me like a splinter growing up to be a sore. Afraid. Don't be a stupid macho bastard, I told myself, and meant it, but it wasn't so much the accusation of fear as the implication that she was somehow—it sounds ridiculous—intellectually braver than I, that she had the guts to push a thing past its limits, to turn it upside down and shake it with all her might, when I was frightened to handle it at all. Maybe it really was as petty-simple as who's the better man; I'd like to think I'm smarter than that, but who knows. At least my own stupidity can't surprise me much anymore.

It was stupid to miss her, but I did that too, and felt not bad at all but even justified: she was a pain in the ass like none other, bossy and reckless and careless of my objections and especially my feelings, but she was my partner in this, she had been there from the start, she
knew.
Most of all, she was Nakota, and that was changeless as theJFunhole itself.

Guess who called who.

"I can come over right now," she said, and, I thought to her credit, there was no triumph in her voice. When she arrived, I knew why: box in her hand, tiny scramblings inside, the sound of scared little feet.

My face did something that even felt ugly, but surprised? No. Not really. She knew it, too. Set the box down on the kitchen table, moved across the room to sit, smoking, on the edge of the closed couchbed.

"Come on, admit it," she said. "You want to know too."

"Yeah, just like I want to know how I'll look when I'm dead, but I'm not in a hurry for that either. For God's
sake,
Nakota! What's next, a baby?"

"A shitty little pet-store rat is hardly a human being," but there was something there I didn't like at all, maybe the too obvious disgust at my words, the shifty overplay. Maybe she knew it too, heard a greed even she didn't want to know she had. Whatever, she turned away, profile hidden by the clean swing of her hair, and an illogic memory came to me: she in my arms in some ice-cold bedroom, red print sleeping bag pulled half around us, me near sleep and chewing with my lips a piece of her hair as it lay across my face. I put my hand up, hiding or warding, I didn't want to see her just then. When I looked up she was looking right at me.

"You don't have to go with me," she said.

Do you even have to ask?

Crouching beside her, hating my own excitement, her fingers blunt and steady as she knotted a handmade fishing-line harness around the mouse's chest and back, and I said something, nervous stupid whisper about nice job and she looked at me, very seriously, and said, "I always think things through." The mouse, nose going a mile a minute, squirming in a terror that reached crescendo as Nakota's firm dangle brought it over the maw of the Funhole: to the mouse it must have looked like Armageddon, deeper than death, and its back arched in a spasm so fierce that I thought the harness would snap and the mouse fall to an unexplored death, but Nakota's work was good and the fishing line held.

"Now," she said.

I looked, then, not at the mouse descending, but at her, so close to the edge, the slow un-tremored movement of her hand, the calm track of her eyes as she watched the process she had started move relentlessly to fruition, but there was a cool frustration there too, unsatisfied, and would be until she made that trek herself; not as long as I'm alive. As the mouse went deeper I snatched a glance, its whiteness a living shock against the Funhole, its claws seeking purchase on what could not be climbed, and I thought, Something bad will happen now, worse than the bugs.

But nothing did. The mouse went deeper still, deep until we could barely see its color, and Nakota said, without turning her head, "Maybe you were—"

and a blast of fur and fluid hit her right in the face, she cried out, made as if to scrape crookedly at her fouled eyes and I saw her knee move, heedless, horrifyingly close and I grabbed her and hauled her sideways as a puff of sweet air came out of the Funhole, heaven's air might smell so good. Shaking, so hard I could barely sit up, but my grip on Nakota was strong enough to hurt.

"Ow," she said, and I let her go, to wipe two-handed at herself, T-shirt up like a towel, and I stared at her breasts as if I had never seen them before. The T-shirt came away gummy. She reached fingers like feelers into her hair, gave her head a gentle shake which dislodged something, some piece, and "Fucking A," she said, and incredibly she laughed, holding up a tail, part of a tail, that had turned to bright primary mosaic and was firm as a rock; she waved it to demonstrate, shook her head again and found a foot. The toes had split and splayed, the claws gone bigger than the foot itself, enormously distended and humped and hideous and she laughed again, really delighted, and I saw a shred of something slick and red stuck to the side of her mouth, etched laugh line of horrible mirth, and I scrambled past her, pushing her nearly as hard as I had held her, out out out of my way.

When she at last emerged I was sitting on the landing, as far away from the door as I could get without actually deserting her. Nothing could have forced me back, maybe not even a scream, her scream, who knows. Anyway, anything that would make Nakota scream would probably scare me into catatonia. I still felt sick, all over.

"Get what you came for?" I asked her as she stopped before me, not clean but cleansed. This kind of adventure was not only her climate, it was maybe the only climate in which she was meant to live. She had her little specimen, or what fragments she had been able to collect, clutched loosely in her right hand; with her left she reached to raise me up. She looked like she could do it, too, strength without effort, toothpick arms infused like Atlas.

"I want to wash up," she said. "This shirt is fucked too."

The water ran a long time. I sat on the couch-bed, drinking beer, my glance a nervous walk from her mouse pieces and back, there and back, wanting not to want to touch them. They were so incredibly
weird,
though. You almost had to touch them, if only to assure yourself that they were really there. Hard rock tail, its shimmer under my dim-bulb lamps, the monstrous foot, and part, maybe, of a head, what had once been a head. Lying there on the fake wood of the coffee table, artifacts of a place whose climate and architecture were enough to warp the fabric of the visitor, tourist or not, go on, idiot, pick up the damned head already! So I did.

Squeamish, but then the sheer steamroller exhilaration of the bizarre came over me; I felt as I had when I, we, first discovered the Funhole: my God, this is so
strange,
. Gently I fingered the strained skull, its half-flayed muzzle,- the eye socket now elongated upward, shaped to a sloping triangle, stretched like old rubber and like old rubber crumbling too, its limits delicate, frost pictures drawn by the terrible dark.

Nakota, humid shower smell and murmuring over my shoulder: "It's so beautiful, Nicholas, isn't it," her last words not inviting agreement but laying down a challenge, and for once I rose to it, reached behind to fondle her hip as I fondled the head, feeling both to be equally strange, equally desirable. Her wet hair dribbling down, fluid on her almost skeletal collarbones, one drop above her breast a slow prismed tremble of light as some freakish angle caught it, jeweled it as I half turned to rise, put my tongue on that wayward drop, imagining as I did that it was the source of the scent given off tonight by the Funhole, black nectar and I bit at her nipple, the half head still safe in my thoughtful grasp. Now her murmur was approval, I was pleasing her at last, pulling her with one hand, nipple still between my teeth and I bit harder, releasing only to lay her down and kneel between her damp and narrow thighs. To guide myself inside I set down the head, and consumed by her wetness I forgot it, or rather disremembered for my thoughts then were unlike the fleshy dreams that usually partnered sex: instead they were explicit, sharp and detailed as the best hallucinations: myself fucking the Funhole, thrusting with all my might, its subtle pull become a vacuum so stark and demanding that I felt, myself coming, far more quickly than I wanted, for either me or Nakota. Looking down I saw her, eyes closed, mouth working, the gruesome little half head pressed and lolling at her nipple, and in that sight was my orgasm, stretched and distorted like the head itself.

Slow panting sighs as I lay down, the sweat on my chest cooling as I pressed against her. Eyes still shut, a graven smile beginning as she raised the head, aiming that twisted muzzle not at her lips but mine.

"Kiss me," she said.

And I did.

The next morning my lips still held that bitter kiss; I could not, did not want to believe that I had actually touched the misshapen mouse mouth with my own. Scrubbing the skin from my mouth with the flattened bristles of my toothbrush, rubbing and rubbing till I had a clown's smile of abrasion, thinking of the mouse head at Nakota's tiny nipple, strange nursling;
she
would never wake disgusted at what she'd done the night before.

Gone, of course, when I woke up; how she managed those noiseless exits baffled me, I was a pretty light sleeper but her movements hadn't roused me, nor the sound of the closing door. To hope for any kind of note was out of the question. The only indication she had been there at all was the damp coiled towel on the tiny bathroom floor.

More than usually surly at work, a surprise because I should have been happy, shouldn't I, more than happy, Nakota and I were lovers again, weren't we? Were we? Not really. Not me. It was the Funhole we'd been screwing, not each other; even the memory as it made me shudder made me hard. Styrofoam cup poised at my mouth, the heat of the coffee soothing my sore skin, I closed my eyes and tried not to think of Nakota's next experiment, or my possible part in it. What did they use to say? "Just say no"?

Why did I waste my time waffling, of course I would say yes to it, I had an incurable problem saying no to Nakota. Why? Simply a lover's reluctance to piss off the beloved, especially one as nuclear-irritable as Nakota? Or maybe my own reluctance to stop this process, my own near-genetic laziness that found her as easy a tool as any and handier than most? The question exhausted me; I refused to try to understand. Skid and drift, that was me and the way I lived my life, foolish, hopeless, irredeemable, a broom-closet hellhole my epiphany, my one true love a woman who had never come close to loving me, even on my best days, her best days, this woman my lover now again in what was at most a terminal waste of time. Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends. Don't agree? Go fuck yourself.

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