Because somewhere out on the Strip, she’s there. I know it. My white doll muse, washed unrecognizable. Got stitches from her throat to her twat, black on bruisy white, left nipple gone limp as any supernumerary mole. Back of her right ear, under the dark roots, there’s a triangular gash—the place where somebody’s steel-toed boot went in. And part by part, she’s ugly. Part by part, she’s poison. But if you ever catch her eye, even for a second—those wide, ivory eyes, like bone, like stone, so level and calm and dead under their maps of burst blood-vessels—she’ll wipe you raw, she’ll drag you down, down deep into the trash at the bottom of the Lake, where the big fish breed. H-shot to the spine, lighter-fluid spurt, imploded orgasm cold as nitrogen, freezing your brain ‘til it shatters at a touch. And you won’t mind at all, man.
You’ll even get to like it.
* * *
This is what she said, that last time—a breathless breath against my ear-lobe:
“Bite down, baby. Bite right down. ’Cause this is all of me you get.”
Skeleton bitch, see her grin
As the knife goes in and in and in and—
End of story.
Folly
Pentheus: You say you saw the God clearly. What was he like?
Dionysus: Whatever he wanted. I had no control over it.
—Euripedes’ Bacchae, Cambridge University Press translation.
GOOD EVENING, LADIES and gentlemen—very sorry for alarming you, if I did. Yes, the lights have been out for some time up here; it happens rather frequently, I’m afraid. Localized brown-outs; that’s what happens when you have an entire town practically running off the same generator. Yet we manage, nevertheless.
At any rate: Again, welcome! Please step through into the front portico-hallway, where our tour will begin as soon as everyone on the list is assembled and accounted for. I’ve sent my assistant Stephen for candles, but it may well take him some time to return. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to rely on my trusty flashlight.
Very well. And . . . here we go, then.
Though the foundations of the Peazant house—or, as its re . . . inventor liked to refer to it, Nova Mephitium—were first laid in late 1887, most of what you see here is far more recent. These alterations and additions date from 1947, when Dr. Denys Peazant took control of his grandparents’ estate. Using old money from the family business (importation, curiosities), which he augmented with a series of governmental grants that may or may not have been under-the-counter “rewards” for his extensive but secretive service in the field of post-mortem communications research during World War II, Dr. Peazant made extensive modifications to the house. So extensive, in fact, that many family retainers quit in horror during the process, accusing him of “defiling” and “gutting alive” the very home where he and his siblings had been born and raised.
A bit strong, perhaps. But it’s certainly true that absolutely nothing now remains of the house Dr. Peazant’s grandfather built except its exterior facade, this hallway we stand in and a wing of personal apartments to which Dr. Peazant used to laughingly refer as “the Sacristy,” which lie through those doors to your left. These are potentially of great interest, but I am restrained by court order from exhibiting them to you—a codicil of Dr. Peazant’s will, you understand.
Interestingly, as a sidebar, you may have noticed that the locals—from whom the insulted retainers were recruited, and to whose ranks they later returned—still never use Dr. Peazant’s own nomenclature when referring to the house. They call it variants on the original, instead . . . Peazant’s Hulk, for one. Peazant’s Ruin. Or my personal favorite, for reasons I’ll revisit in good time . . .
. . . Peazant’s Folly.
* * *
Outside, nothing too spectacular. A typical red-brick monstrosity squatting at the top of the hill like some overfed gentleman’s angioplasty-courting heart, cloaked by firs and lapped in gloom, apparently content to grow mainly by osmosis: Extrude a fresh lobe of windows, turrets and buttresses for each new decade and spread wide, sinking ever deeper inside itself, ‘till its original shape disappears from view completely.
As you approach from below, the silhouette of the house seems to reach out in all directions at once; its proximity comes with a subtle aftertaste attached, pungent as the smell of burning rubber along some otherwise charming but inexplicably accident-prone road.
It makes little attempt at concealment. Any passerby has only to look at it once to know: This house, this house. THIS house, beyond the shadow of a shadow of a doubt—
—is haunted.
* * *
If you would please keep to our original path, however—yes, that’s the door to the interior up ahead. And what a very good observation: The hallway is indeed designed to seem considerably shorter, and less narrow, than it actually is. The source of this illusion lies in Dr. Peazant’s use of multiple archways whose columns are just wide enough to mask the next archway lying beyond; it’s an architectural trick called “forced perspective,” usually used to make things seem larger. And another interesting turn of phrase, too, considering its application.
You will also note that the walls are hung with deliberately foggy mirrors made from hammered bronze. This serves to fracture the reflections of approaching . . . Dr. Peazant, I am relatively sure, would call them pilgrims, or even supplicants . . . in such a way that, very occasionally, one might almost—
—ah, yes. But it would probably be far more effective simply to show you.
Look into the mirrors, and keep walking. As you do, you may begin to see something take shape behind your own reflection, a vague shimmer at the edge of your vision. As it does, watch the way that this doubling effect seems to spread across your own reflected face, obscuring it like some sort of metallic caul; like the tough white facial membrane some children are born with, seventh sons of seventh sons and such, which must be first cut away in order to free the breathing passages and then dried, saved, worn around the neck in a small leather sack. A presentiment of prophecy made flesh, signifying some inborn ability to see your own future—or that of others—coming, ahead of time.