Soul eater, p.1
Soul Eater, page 1
Soul Eater
by K. W. Jeter
Most of the time the big kitchen knife lay in a drawer, the razor edge and tapering point of its carbon-steel blade protected by a cardboard sheath. But now he saw that it had been driven into the kitchen wall, pinning Sarah’s apron. It was an I LOVE N.Y. apron, a bright red heart taking the place of the word LOVE. The apron’s ties had been looped over a towel rack on one side and a cupboard door on the other, giving it a rough semblance of a human figure, a domestic scarecrow.
The knife’s point has been plunged straight into the center of the red heart.
His pulse grew harder behind his temple. The arrangement was low on the wall, the knife right where his ten-year-old child’s arm would have jabbed it.
PAN BOOKS
London, Sydney and Auckland
First published 1983 by Tor Books New York This edition published 1990 by Pan Books Ltd, Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
© K. W. Jeter 1983
ISBN 0 330 31682 6
Cover by Dave McKean
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Lines on p 81 are from The Secret of the Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung, reproduced by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Lines on p 205 are from ‘We Must Bleed’ by Darby Crash and Pat Smear © 1980 Crash Course Music (Admin, by Bug). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
To Geri
Contents
Before
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
After
Mine is the voice one cannot hear,
That whispers in the darkened heart of fear;
From one shape to another without cease,
And thus my cruel power I increase.
—Goethe’s Faust (Part II, Act 5),
Before
She woke up and felt for the knife under the pillow. Her fingers curved around the wooden handle between the sheet and the pillow’s cool underside. Ghost light from the city’s blue streetlamps flowed into the room. Her heart and breathing began to slow as the shapes of the room formed and became solid. Now she knew where she was.
Letting go of the knife, she sat up, hugged her knees and the covers close to her. Still dark outside, a pale coil of memory opened and twisted in the night. She brought her thumb to her mouth and kissed where she had scraped it across the knife’s cutting edge. It was the biggest knife she had been able to find here. After everyone had gone to sleep, she had slipped. out, padded barefoot in the dark to the kitchen, slowly pulled open the drawer so that no one could hear, and taken the knife back to her bed. She had been sleeping with a knife for a long time. It seemed as long as she could remember with her mother but she was ten now, and she had been nine back then, so she knew it had only been a year or so.
The rushing noise of the freeway was softer now, the sound stretched thin into cars swooping close and fading away one at a time, and the rumbling clatter of trucks. Just outside the window the bushy fronds of the palm trees said little hissing words as the wind rustled through them. And then-under that she could hear—faintly—the sound of two other people’s breathing in the apartment’s darkness.
She sat curled up, her own breathing slowly matching time with the others’. That was something she had done before, too: huddled in the dark and listened for the sounds of someone near. But the knife had been ready in her hands then, not just tucked close by. And the dark space had not been sleeping, but instead tensed awake and waiting.
A motorcycle rasped and coughed in the quiet street outside. She leaned her face against her knees, hair breaking dark across the blanket and her nightgown’s sleeve, and listened to the up-and-down whines of the small engine going through its gears. A city noise. That was fine; people made those. At this night hour, though, the silence beneath everything broke through, and that was the same here as anywhere else.
The covers fell away as she slid her legs to the side of the bed and reached down to the carpet with her bare feet. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and she could see everything in the room now, but she stood in the center with her hands spread apart from her, as if balancing on the sharpest point of a mountain. She was afraid to touch the table or the lamp or the chair, in case they should turn out to be really made of the fog that the blue light made them seem to be. They might dissolve like fog, and the room with them, and she’d find herself someplace she didn’t want to be, instead of here. That’s silly. She tensed at the words in her head, then relaxed. It was her own voice; the other one was silent against the night’s deeper silence. She reached down and grasped the chrome and glass of the table, cold in the night air. It stayed solid in her hand.
Her feet made no sound on the carpet as she walked down the hallway, listening to the breathing air as she approached it. A faint wedge of light slid around the bathroom door. She pushed it open; legs, pale and transparent, danced slowly in midair, a bisected ghost. Not really, she saw—just a pair of ballet tights that belonged to her father’s girlfriend, Sarah. They were washed and hanging on the shower-curtain rod, the thin fabric fluttering disembodied entrechats in the breeze from the window. Another pair of tights, smaller, hung beside those. They were hers; Sarah had bought them for her, along with a pair of ballet shoes, at the Capezio store in the enormous shopping center with the waterfall flowing into a river of smooth stones right in the middle of it. And a dark blue leotard she’d wanted, just like one of Sarah’s.
A handless arm drifted close to her. The sleeve of a white cotton blouse. Her father had bought that for her. The blouse and the tights seemed like the skin of some other girl that she put on when she was here, and shed again when she went home to her mother and aunt. She reached and took it, holding the light cloth against her face. She had worn the blouse home from her class, and then she and Sarah had washed their things out in the sink and hung them up. That had become a regular part of her weekends with her father. During the week, Sarah took the Advanced classes at the studio, but Saturday mornings she would take the Beginning along with her. He father would sit outside the classroom with the other parents—mostly mothers, but a couple like him—his legs straddling a metal folding chair, hands and chin resting along its back, and watch the two of them at the barre and in the middle of the floor. She could see him, and would smile, but Sarah couldn’t unless she fished her glasses out of her dance bag and put them back on for a second.
The blouse smelled of detergent and cold water. She thought she could smell a lingering trace of sweat: both she and Sarah came out of the classes with their hair in damp tendrils along their foreheads and the backs of their necks. This was just the sweat of moving, though. Not the other scent she remembered, of her own body in clothes that stiffened and grayed from never being washed, mixing with the fear in the cramped space, the not-sleeping and watching for the other that moved in the dark. darker She let go, and the breeze floated the blouse away from her.
Even quieter down the hallway, away from the windows that let in the scraps of the city’s noise. The bedroom door was open just a crack. She pushed it—slowly; no sound—and looked inside. She could make out her father’s hair, dark as hers, against the pillow. Sarah’s, lighter, tangled on his arm, her sleeping face pressed against his bare shoulder. A fold of the blanket across his chest grew deeper, then shallower with his breathing.
She stood watching. Then it seemed as though the sound of breathing grew louder and louder, until it roared against the walls. It wouldn’t stop; she had to lean against it like wind on the flat desert to keep from falling. Yet her father and Sarah didn’t wake up. She realized it was her own breathing; she had walked through the apartment in a dream, and now she was awake. Quiet again, quiet enough to hear the other voice if it came. She looked down to her hands clasped against her chest and saw that she had brought the knife with her.
The pain woke her. The pain, and the night air sifting through the broken window. A few splinters of glass still dangled in the frame like jagged teeth. A wadded-up towel had been stuffed into the hole, but did nothing to stop the wind, carrying with it the sour smells—cooking oil fried into gray air, toxic sweats—of the city’s inner streets. She clenched her eyes shut and twisted blindly on the cracked linoleum floor, trying to wrap the thin blanket closer around herself, until the pain throbbed again and brought her the rest of the distance to waking.
Some insulating chemical had filtered out of her veins; blood seeped back into her flesh, and the throttled-down nerves shrieked in response. Burns—the thought came through a haze as she pressed her face into the blanket’s folds. This was nothing new. Scar tissue like wrinkled crepe already clung to the back of one of her legs.
This time it was in her forearm. It grew sharper with each pulse, a knife-edge shape moving closer in little steps, driving off the last of the concealing fog with its heat.
It became too large to hold inside. Her eyes op ened, and a line of salt broke and traced the hollow curve of her cheek. She didn’t wipe the tear away; it would dry where others had, the wet paths crossing to form the X’s of words that couldn’t be spelled out but stood for the mute pain of an animal watching the stages of its own death without understanding.
She saw the marks now. Small red circles where the fire had bit into the pale flesh of her arm. The burns were so small that her fingertip completely blotted one out as she touched it. The pain sang even higher with the contact. Whatever it was that had burned her—she had no memory of it and was grateful, remembering the other hurting things that had gone before on her flesh—it had come at her again and again: random constellations of the marks dotted the skin.
If she held herself very carefully, balanced on a thin wire over the black, then the pain and the chemical nausea could be endured. Each breath held, and released; silence inside. No voice but her own barely shaped thoughts. The aftermath, the object left behind by the receding tide—the marred skin held no one but herself.
The wind through the broken window became sharper. She sat up, wrapping the blanket tighter around herself. She didn’t recognize the dress that she had on. The thin, cheaply shiny fabric smelled of smoke and sweat, as did her hair, dangling in matted strands down her neck.
No idea where she was, whether she had been in this collapsing room before—the dark walls were overlaid with memories of other rooms, other pain-filled wakings—or how she had come here. She whispered her own name, as she had done before, the sound barely brushing past her dry lips: “Kathy.” She knew that much, but sometimes another voice would speak with her mouth. That voice said other things.
A shape moved on the floor, roused by a human sound. She was not alone in the room. A man, deep in sleep. His thick-muscled arm flopped onto the linoleum as he rolled onto his back. An unreadable tattoo lay tangled in the bicep’s dark, bristling hair. His chest moved with slow breathing from the mouth of a face that she didn’t recognize.
Maybe she could get away without waking him. She watched the man carefully, gauging the depth of his sleep from the slow, dragging breaths. There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere but whatever street lay outside. But that would be at least a few moments’ respite from this room and the others like it. The farther she ran before the other voice spoke inside her head, the longer it would take for her unwilling legs to carry her back here. Enough time for the wounds to heal at least a little bit.
She leaned forward onto her hands and knees. Still watching the sleeping man, she raised herself from the floor. Pain, duller than the burns on her arm, ground through her spine as it unknotted from the ball she had formed of herself on the cold linoleum. She stood up and turned. Before she even saw the other figure in the room, she felt the hand clamp on her wrist and shove her backward.
In the middle of the room there was enough light from the street so that she could see the other man’s thumb digging into the stringlike tendons of her wrist. Beyond that, his arm. And his face: a short fringe of hair falling toward the top of mirror-lensed glasses, the skin tight against the bones underneath, as though it had been gathered in back and pulled taut. Small, even teeth—for a moment she thought they might have caused the marks on her arm—lined up in a grin as he held her motionless. “Leaving?” he said. “Party’s just started.”
She said nothing, could say nothing as she looked into the dark silver lenses perched on the drumhead skin. For a moment she recognized the face, knew his name, but then pushed it away as impossible.
The man’s eyes, dimly seen behind the lenses, shifted away from her. He nodded his head toward the sleeping Figure. “How long’s he been out?” He waited for a reply, got none, then pulled her closer to himself, the point of his gaze paring her skin away. Cold amusement in his voice: “What’s your name?”
She started to speak. Her lips parted, her own name forming on her tongue. Then she heard the other voice, but not inside her head this time. “Renee,” it said with her mouth. “My name’s Renee.”
He let go of her, and she felt herself falling backward. She looked up at him from where she sprawled and watched him fish a cigarette from his coat pocket. From behind her eyes, another thing watched as well. He exhaled gray smoke, nodding to himself. When he looked at her, the smile was no longer cruel.
“You made it,” he said. Admiringly.
She was held from inside—there was no way to tear her eyes from his hidden ones. The glasses reflected the broken window across the room, so that two identical sharp-toothed mouths gazed at her. Her arm raised—she watched, helpless—and lifted her hand to him. Then she felt the sharp bite of the cigarette as he pressed its glowing end to the center of the palm, etching another mark like the ones on her arm.
“I knew you’d make it back,” he said softly. “I’ve been waiting.”
The wind pried at the apartment’s roof, and the bad dreams seeped in. Under the weight of sleep he dreamed of his daughter, and his heart hammered the breath out of his throat. There was a field he ran through, the edges expanding in every direction as his feet stumbled and caught on the uneven earth. It was night in the dream, but different: only the same dry wind laid its soft hand over his face. The dark shapes of mountains along the horizon were edged with pale light, as though the moon had dissolved and spread behind them; he could see the thin ribbon of his shadow twisting and breaking over the furrows as he ran. His daughter was nowhere in the dream. He shouted her name over and over, then stopped, trying to hear more than the echoes of his own voice answering. Nothing but the wind, and his panting breath mingling in it. Then he fell in another direction, searching for her on the field stretching away beneath his feet.
When he woke, gasping for air, his eyes swept across the dark ceiling. Its mottled points came into focus. Another second, and he felt a warm weight beside him in the bed. His hand brushed under the covers and touched a curve of flesh. It’s all right, he told himself as his eyes closed to the deeper black where the last traces of the dream were fading. He swallowed the sour taste in his mouth, his tongue dry from the shouting that had sounded only in the dream’s dark field.
For a moment he lay listening to Sarah’s breathing. Then he felt his other hand, dangling down the side of the bed, pressed by something. There was something holding on to it from which he couldn’t pull loose. Something warm. Still confused with sleep, he rolled onto his shoulder and looked down beside the bed.
“Dee—” he said wonderingly. His daughter was huddled on the floor, clutching his hand. It was as if some fragment of his dream had persisted into his waking: the little girl, his child, whom he had called and searched for so desperately was here. Her cheek was pressed tight against his arm, the hair above his wrist bending with her shallow breaths. Her fingers, ivory against his coarser skin, were locked around his hand tight enough to cut the circulation. He realized how far he must have been into the rigors of his dreaming not to have felt her grip until now. Her eyes were tensed shut, the wrinkling eyelids matched by lines across her brow. Some dark landscape of her own held her.
Just a nightmare, he thought as he brushed a strand of hair from his daughter’s sleeping face. That’s all. He wondered if she got them often; what happened in them, on what night-lit ground she ran and from what shapes she fled. Maybe—the thought tightened around his heart—maybe there had been times before when she had reached for his hand and it hadn’t been there. That thought saddened him as he watched his daughter’s sleep. The past was in the room, faintly, like dust drifted in under the door by the wind.
Carefully he pulled his hand free from her grasp without waking her and laid her head against the side of the bed. He pushed the covers away from himself. Beside him, Sarah turned and murmured something, dimly sensing his movements. Sliding down to where he could swing his legs out of the bed without hitting Dee, he sat up and fished his pants from the floor.
Standing at the foot of the bed, he gazed at the two sleeping figures, the woman arched on the bed and the girl curled beside it, and felt the odd protective power that came from being the only one awake at a far hour of the night. He could hear their breathing, and the pulse of his heart, in the room’s silence. The only sound from outside was the wind shearing against the building’s corners. He listened and watched, guarding against nothing and everything. If there had been nights when his daughter’s hand had reached and not found him, there had also been nights when he had lain awake, peering through the layers of darkness and wondering about her.
