Spectral Evidence

Except, he didn’t. No one did. It’s a frigging story , Nimue.

GirlInTree:

KirlianPhotog:

GirlInTree:

A long pause, this time. Long enough for Nim to remember the last time they “spoke,” when she spilled on Ross about Veruca’s RL nutsiness. only to get a similarly wry line in r

eturn:

And thinking: Yeah, granted. Which may well be why she and Ross keep it strictly between the lines—why they’ve never thought to hook up for real, even though they live in the same city. Like they’re afraid to meet each other in the flesh, for fear of being disappointed that their “soulmate” might come attached to tics they can’t stand: Veruca, all over again. Thinking…

Shit, am I that easy? That hard?

But all things must come to an end, even this. And so the pause breaks at last, with Ross’s final post—

KirlianPhotog:

—

Hours later, meanwhile…

…they’re already through the door, inside the Speed of Pain, where the bass is loud enough to blow your hair back, bottom-heavy enough to sound like an abyssal snake coiling and uncoiling in some parallel dimension. Up on stage, two women gyrate in a black-lit go-go cage, each using a hand-held buzzsaw to strike sparks off the crotch of the other’s metal bikini. Posters are plastered everywhere, blurring together in the changing light; there’s a livid yellow flyer on the floor at Nim’s feet, one of many, piled in clumps so high they brush the ankles. It reads:

TONIGHT, GRAND OPENING, AFTER MIDNIGHT. NO COVER. DEEJAY CEMETERY OX 'TIL DAWN. FEATURED BAND—FUDGETONGUE, DUST-GOWNED, PLUS RANCIDULCET (THE SOFT SOUND OF ROT).

Nim looks around, throat already raw with stray pot smoke and heat, vaguely recalling what it used to be like, back when this was still something else. But now it looks somehow darker and bigger, offputtingly so—a huge overhanging ceiling strung with lightbulb stars, a dance-floor inset intermittently with stained glass and lit from beneath, to weirdly patterned effect. Everything swims, hypnagogic, dream-sick.

And it’s at this point, naturally enough—when she’s already off-centre, and the noise conspires to render her all but unintelligible—that Nim sees Veruca’s face assume an awful look of slack hunger as somebody she can only assume is Tom Darbersmere appears in the middle distance, near one end of the room-long bar: that man-shaped thing with the laughing white null for a face, arm wound around the shoulders of a woman (Alicia?) whose long brown hair hangs heavy, interrupted only by a rising dragon’s tongue of smoke.

Veruca surges against the crowd, chapbook already in hand, but Nim grabs her by the arm before she can quite start to move.

“You know there’s no way any of that actually happened, right?” she bellows over the roar.

“What part?”

“Like, any of it? Holy crap, Veruca, get a fucking grip. I mean, this is some sick sort of shit right here—”

Veruca purses her lips, a disappointed moue, like: Oh, Nim. And says, only:

“I have to go.”

“Veruca, look at them!” Nim has to scream now, feeling her face distort with the effort. “Does he look seventy? Does she look, what, a fucking hundred?”

“Not anymore.”

“They couldn’t get away with it. Not today. They couldn’t. Veruca!”

But she’s gone. Vanished into the crowd, a salmon slipping effortlessly beneath the rapids, heading upstream.

And it’s stupid, but Nim keeps on glitching on that…story. “The Emperor’s old Bones,” which she finally read in full on her way up here, under streetcar-light. That scene in the kitchen, that last phone conversation between “Tim” and the head chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine…

Sure, the author makes it sound “plausible” enough, in the moment—that’s his damn job. Even if you accept “The Emperor’s…” as Tim Darbersmere’s work to begin with, though, all the Wiki’ing in the world won’t let you skip over the fact that he did this exact same sort of shit before, a couple of times: the case-study for a disease that didn’t exist, that 1960s piece where he convinced everybody who was anybody he’d lost his arms to gangrene, after a car accident outside Cannes… And yes, glamour and exoticism turns tarnished if it’s revealed that the gruesomeness is factual, not just squeamish, gleeful metaphor—but it doesn’t matter, does it? After all—

—things like that aren’t true. Thankfully. Because if you thought, if you even suspected, even dreamed they were, then it’d be time to—

(bury yourself in the sand, face-down)