Manson stood next to me at the bar. She wore a dark gown and a star pattern of heavy purple eyeshadow. “We don’t usually entertain more than a couple of guests. This is special.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“It’s Tuesday. Go back to your quarters. Ms. Spencer left you a gift.”
“Because it’s Tuesday?”
“Because there will be entertainment later this evening and you may wish to dress appropriately.”
This is where you came in…
Averna kept me stewing (quite literally) for forty-eight hours, plus or minus; a fact I estimated by the phase of the moon and an above average internal clock.
Why giant synthetic eggs? The design of the incubators was strictly symbolic. The contents--a contemporary primordial soup chock full of vitamins, proteins, and assorted mystery elements intended to cleanse her chosen, to heighten our reflexes and provide sufficient high-test nourishment for a proper hunt--could’ve done its work in a tank. She preferred elaborate theatrics; a consequence of eternal life. Have to wonder which came first: murderous rage or immortality. Since I could only hazard a guess, I guessed the eggs were deposited at various predetermined sites on the estate. We prisoners “hatched” and were subsequently hunted by our hostess and her majordomo.
During incubation, my dreams were psychedelic and fantastically, Lucio-Fulci-strength, macabre. Visions, perhaps. I beheld the male guests pelting through a night forest roiling with phosphorescent mist. Averna glided down on stiff, black wings. Her wingsuit defied physics. She tilted vertically and her toes dug into the soil every third or fourth gigantic stride and beheaded each of the fleeing men with a casual swipe of her metallic talons. She accelerated in dizzying curlicues through gaps in the trees.
Averna crooned to me through an intravenous drip. She spoke of evolutionary slippage, of natural mutation and genetic manipulation.
I die and live again and again. My soul regenerates into new flesh.
I have broken the hearts of countless men. I have eaten the beating hearts of countless men. I have devoured so many beating hearts, I shit and piss black heartblood.
I am a fountainhead of raped vitality.
I am a supplicant of the gods of eternal return.
I mean to devour you as I’ve devoured the rest in their multitudes.
You’ll regenerate as I have done since the dawn of hominids. We’ll meet again in a hundred million years at the dawn of the hominids. We’ll meet again between one scream and the next.
Wake up, wake up, wake up…
I love and hate The Vanishing. The Dutch version by Sluizer; don’t bother with the American remake, hunky Jeff Bridges notwithstanding. In a previous life, I made my bread as a marine biologist. I survived many a tedious night aboard fishing tenders on the Bering Sea with a stack of paperbacks and VHS tapes while the rest of the crew was drunk or unconscious. Somewhere in the middle of The Vanishing a character describes a nightmare of being trapped in the darkness of a golden egg. Love it because the image got to me on a primal level and stuck. Hate it for the same reason.
These many years later, waking to fluid blackness three thousand miles east of Alaska, tubes up my nose and down my throat, body coiled like an embryo inside a golden egg of my very own? Must be the abyss everybody talks about.
I kicked, one-two, and dove deep into a sea of blood. Crimson light churned. The shell cracked and broke and the universe spilled me onto a carpet of pine needles. Out came the rubber tubes with a yank; then a bout of projectile vomiting--pheasant, sorbet, and copious amounts of whiskey and synthetic amniotic fluid. The blood in my eyes seeped down and dried into scales. Tears dug diamond furrows through caked-on grime. My convulsions subsided. I stood and leaned like a drunk against the bole of a hemlock and assessed the fucked-uppedness of my situation.
A mild evening in early October. Mosquitos whined; could have been worse. Clouds rolled over a crescent moon. Had to think fast, had to move. Standing still would get me dead. Moving would get me dead. Where was Rikki-tikki-tavi in my hour of need? An owl screeched. The bird glided past; the very shadow of death itself.
I’d trained for the direst scenarios—spent the previous several months jogging barefoot to toughen my feet; I also worked on traveling in New England forests at night to sharpen my lowlight vison. An affinity for rough and tumble notwithstanding, no way, no how am I a martial artist. I sparred with Beasley, who agreed (after I walked into his right hand three or four times) keeping it simple would be for the best. He honed my bag of dirty tricks and taught me a couple new ones.
Should’ve done more. Should’ve stayed in bed.
For all the roadwork and psychological preparation, and despite my alleged “purpose” and indomitable resolve, it was a psychological body blow to wash up on the proverbial lee shore: naked in the middle of the woods in the dead of night, pumped to the gills with experimental juice and on the run from Elizabeth Bathory II and her army of mercs. I intoned Dr. Campbell’s mnemonic phrase (the mind is a camera) that would supposedly trigger a pseudo-holographic image of the surroundings. It worked, too.
I waded down a stream to confuse tracking dogs, then dug a hole near the roots of a tree and covered myself in clay, pine needles, and sap. I hadn’t worn hair products or used scented soap or perfume in months. The docs put me on a regimen of an experimental, military grade antiperspirant.
Smeared head to toe in muck, I ran like hell through the dark, dark woods like the doomed heroine of a slasher flick. I angled southeast for the extraction point (would Beasley await my arrival?); kept right on trucking until daylight and then burrowed into a deadfall and slept. Night came around. I slurped brackish water from a puddle and set forth again, skulking from tree to tree with a wild animal’s determination to survive. For a while, I believed I’d successfully evade and escape. Hope makes fools of us all.
Contrary to the cliché, I didn’t trip and sprain an ankle, didn’t sob or shriek to give away my position, and didn’t glance over my shoulder every ten feet. Perversely, that last detail proved my downfall.
She hit me the way a hawk or an owl does an unsuspecting squirrel. Instead of severing my spine on impact, Averna merely snagged my long, luxurious mane and ascended vertically, yanking me off my feet. Similar to those rides at the State Fair—the ones where a scabrous, hungover carny straps you into a harness that dangles from a big metal wheel and up your sorry ass goes, with nothing between your sneakers and sod but a sheer drop.
The radiant sickle moon gashed the clouds; first above, then below. Averna clutched my hair in her left fist and skimmed treetops at a precipitous velocity, dragging me several feet lower like the tail of a kite. We dipped and swooned; accelerating, decelerating. If she had a jet pack strapped on her back, I didn’t hear it. The only sounds I heard were the hissing breeze, and the clatter of branches when she swung me viciously against the canopy. Each blow knocked the breath from me and tore my flesh.
God knows where the bitch’s flight plan would’ve taken us. I didn’t stick around for the surprise. It required a metric fuck-ton of grit to recover from the initial whiplash and saw through my hair with a shard of the designer egg I’d carried (and managed not to drop) this entire time. Sliced my fingers and palm, but it got the job done—half a dozen convulsive hacks later, the last strand parted and I bailed. She cried my name.