We were staying in a hotel next to the theatre on Calle Fenice, in a room with walls the colour of blood, patterned in threads of pale gold and delicate lines of mold. The shower had stopped working long ago, but the toilet still flushed and, against all reason, the sheets were clean. When I stepped out of the between, Josie lay curled on the floor, clinging to the Turkish carpet rucked beneath her folded body as if it were the only thing holding her to this world.
“It burns. Ara, it burns.”
I crouched beside her and touched her, feeling the sharp ridges of her spine through clothing and skin.
“Make it stop.” She rocked and whimpered.
I lifted her sweater, peeling it as though from a wound. Tattoos, inked long before R’lyeh rose, writhed across Josie’s flesh. Black ink against skin the colour of fired clay, lashing, twisting, moving in ways nothing ever should.
“Make it stop. It hurts. Make it stop.” Josie turned her face, just enough to show tears and stark terror.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know how.”
There were so many places I wanted to show her. I wanted to take her deep—somewhere off the coast of Mexico, to another drowned world full of turquoise water and old bones. I wanted to hold her hand, even through thick rubber gloves, and gesture to her through the enforced silence of breathing tubes and masks, hoping she’d understand.
She shuddered at the mere mention and I went alone. I let the stillness envelop me; I drifted. Vast things floated beside me; an eye the size of Luxemburg opened below me in the deep. I should have been terrified, but I felt only peace as it looked into me and through me.
I used to think there were some sins too terrible even for R’lyeh, some offerings the spaces between would always refuse. But in that moment, I understood: Sin is a human concept. I did what I did to remain human. I buried sin deep at my core. I could walk the ways between a hundred, thousand times, and it would never change the deepest, most fundamental part of me.
In the end, I never took Josie anywhere. For a while, I tried to hold her when nightmares shivered beneath her skin, when her tattoos writhed in their own dreams. My touch made it worse.
The day I left, she sat on the hotel bed, head bowed. A red-glass heart from Murano lay cupped in her palm, brilliant as blood. Bubbles ran through its core. I touched it with one finger; the glass was warm from her skin.
“I don’t know why I have this,” she said.
Her eyes held hurt, raw as a wound. Whatever I’d taken from her, trying to guide her through the between, was something I could never replace. Some wounds never heal. I left. I didn’t ask her to forgive me.
Here and now, a ruby spotlight pins Josie—an American girl, singing Southern standards and bluesy jazz in a drowned and drowning city half-way across the world. Her song cuts knife-deep, touches bone. I can’t help remembering the last time we lay, cooling in each others’ sweat, windows open, listening to the crowds leaving the Teatro. The breeze raised goosebumps on her skin, skin the colour of Tuscan hills, of earth, of a time before the Risen Ones.
That was the last time salt tasted good.
Josie’s voice is sandstone, rubbed against my skin. It is coffee, scalding hot and poured into my lap. In the ruby spotlight and the green seeping from the edges of the world, she’s beautiful.
I sip my martini, slid without asking across the bar by the loyal bartender, Lorence. His skin is damp, his eyes as pained as the poor boy who served me in Harry’s Bar. No matter that it hurts him, he still labours to breathe with human lungs, shunning his gills.
Josie leaves the stage. Her dress swirls against legs encased in nylon, blooming roses. The skirt catches light in its folds, red on red, pooling blood. She wears a flower in her braided hair. Once upon a time, I may have given her a flower the same shade—a real one, not a silk monstrosity with hot-glue dew-drops clinging to its petals.
Her eyes meet mine, their moss-green accentuated by the underwater light. A smile touches her lips but not her gaze.
“Ara.” Josie brushes her lips against my cheek, making sure to catch the corner of my mouth.
She smells of powdered lily-of-the-valley, dusted heavy to hide the reek of fear. Someone very wealthy must have bought it for her. Scents like that are hard to come by.
Guilt spreads patterns of frost across the surface of my heart, but it doesn’t touch the core. Pain flickers in Josie’s eyes. I’ve forgotten; she hasn’t.
I tip my head towards Lorence; it’s the least I can do. Josie orders something as blood-red as her dress, but with far more kick.
“What are you doing here?” Josie asks.
Her fingernails are ragged, as if she’s been raking them across the walls in her sleep. A tendril of ink slips from beneath the strap of her dress, a questing tongue tasting the air. She shivers. The ink-shadow stains her eyes for a moment, too, turning them the colour of lightning-struck wood.
“I was lonely,” I say. It may be the most honest thing I’ve ever said; I don’t know.
“Oh?” Her eyes are green again, sparking mockery.
She lifts the long, black braid lying over my shoulder, running it through trembling hands.
“I wish I could do something for you.” The words fall, a numb rush over my lips.
Josie is the most breathtaking woman I’ve ever known. Why can’t I feel anything for her? I know what she meant to me, what she means to me, but I don’t feel it. Not anymore. Her skin flickers, the ink shivering across its surface and underneath. I mimic the motion unconsciously, my body responding to her hands on my hair.
“There’s nothing you can do.” She drops my braid, a soft slap against my leather.
Josie hes her drink and orders another, her mouth set in a hard line that reminds me of Madam Senator and the case I should be on. What am I doing here?
“There’s nothing I can do for you, either.” Josie steps back, eyes as hard as the line of her mouth.
She’s right. There’s nothing I can do except buy her drinks. And isn’t there a selfish hope that her inhibitions will drop and we’ll end up back in that decaying hotel room, listening to the remnants of humanity leave the Teatro while we fuck?
Once, in the space between midnight and dawn, in the half-dark—an unnatural glow belonging to caves and never aboveground—I tasted the nightmare-sweat slicking Josie’s skin. I traced the writhing lines of her tattoos with my tongue. She didn’t wake. That sweat wasn’t sweat—it tasted like the oil born of the rotting bones of prehistoric beasts, oozing beneath the skin of the world.
Josie’s next words send my pulse into the roof of my mouth. “Do you remember what you told me about your stepbrother and the night you got your scars?”
“No.” The word comes out hoarse, terrible. Josie’s smile is worse. I can’t remember if it’s a lie.
What did I tell her? What if I took her between, trying to make her forget?
Josie leans forward, her lips against my ear, her breath raising tiny hairs on my skin. Her voice is smoke, rough whiskey, shattered amber. “He called you his angel. They’re shaped like wings, your scars.”
When she draws back, I feel the absence of her breath.
“I don’t think you’re even human, anymore.” Her hips sway as she walks back to the stage.
God help me, I’m wet and trembling. I want to throw her over the bar and bury my head between her legs, nipping the soft flesh of her thighs till she bleeds. Maybe she’s right about me. Maybe I’m not human. Maybe I’m too much so.
Josie grips the microphone like she wants to throttle it. Her voice is steel wool, scouring flesh; her eyes are fixed on me.
The blood-and-seawater light fills my mouth with salt. The world rolls. Firelight flickers, throwing shadows against the thinness of my eyelids.
“The world is going to end.” A voice speaks against my ear.
“It’s already ending.” I smell wet leather, tangle my fingers through wheat-gold hair, and pull wine-stained lips against mine. Rain drums. Hay prickles bare skin. “So, fuck me,”