The Mirrors Page 10

  I read and I read the Shaman’s scrolls until I succumbed to a pristine, dreamless sleep unlike any I’d ever had. A slumber that lasted lifetimes.

  It was the voice of a maiden, shouting outside my hovel, that awoke me—the first voice I’d heard since the Shaman’s. “Is anyone there?” she said, with a manner and an accent I could barely understand. “Show yourself. Friend or foe!”

  Pale, naked, and wrinkled, I was in no condition to greet a young lady. I’d not yet lost respect for that convention of society. I walked past the oak table and found a wardrobe I’d never bothered opening before (for the animals hadn’t found my nakedness at all offensive). Inside, there hung a white silken suit, shoes, and jester’s hat. I hastily put on the attire, then crouched down to exit—for the first time in so long—the hovel.

  She wore black boots and a strange, green gambeson and trousers that made her blend in well with the lush leaves of the forest. A helmet adorned her head. She wore a belt that held various and sundry devices, the likes of which I’d never seen before.

  Her eyes widened at the sight of me. They were tired, vacant, suffering eyes. I discovered I now had the ability see inside her head, to see the hideous tapestry and hear the chaotic cacophony hidden in her brain. The whole world on fire. Villages the size of a thousand Sultors destroyed in the blink of an eye. Iron rods that one man could use to spit fire into another. Only tiny pockets of survivors here and there. In her thoughts, if not her words, she wished the death of the world and the deity who fashioned it. If she listened to me, perhaps I could help. Could make things right, after my failure at Drau Meghena. All I’d need was an offering, that most special of offerings. The one I’d given the Shaman before me.

  “Who are you?” the lady warrior said. “What are you?”

  It was then I gave words to the new truth. “I am the Shaman of Cravenbynn.”

  —for Thomas Ligotti

  All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Piggy Class

  I. Piggy Class

  We’d made the papier-mâché Piggy masks in art class, all the way back in middle school. It had been career day, and we’d just taken a vocational aptitude test. My cousin Cheyenne’s results had told her that she’d make a good Hen. Daniel (my older brother), who’d taken a similar test five years before me, had been told he’d make a good Bull. The butcher who prepared his body for market sent a kind note informing us that he’d proven a fine specimen and had not so much as flinched before entering the abattoir.

  The treasure of our family, though—the one who made us all proud—was my eldest brother, Dylan (at fifteen years my senior, he always treated me more like a niece than a sister). His aptitude test had said he’d make a good farm hand. And so off he went one day, to a farm up around Cherry Hill. He consoled us by pointing out that they mostly grew feed corn and soybeans up there, with a few goats thrown in as a hobby. So the chances of his being put in the awkward position of farming a sibling were remote.

  My aptitude test said I’d make a good Piggy. As soon as I’d received the results, the Enforcer escorted me out of the principal’s office to join the other Piggies in Ms. Tinsman’s art class. That’s when we made our masks.

  It didn’t make any sense to me at the time that Ms. Cafferty (our principal) confiscated them before we could try them on. “Not yet, my little Piglets! Wallow in summertime before you don your masks,” she’d said.

  That didn’t make any sense at all. Not until the first day at Lagrange High School, when I opened my assigned locker and discovered the Piggy mask I’d made three months before dangling from a coat hook, awaiting me. A mimeographed sheet read: Wear This Now! Be This Now! If You Are Not Piggy Enough, You Will Be Expelled!

  I’d never known anyone in school who’d been Expelled, but one heard stories over the years. Rumor had it that the school system liked to dissect The Expelled to find out just what had gone wrong. Rumor had it they started the procedure when you were alive. I can’t imagine why, unless one’s response to the dissection was part of the data collected. The school system did so love testing.

  To be Expelled meant you had failed to fulfill your niche in life—a fate most people in town considered worse than death due to the dishonor it inflicted on the entire family. If I were ever to join the ranks of The Expelled, I would bring great shame to my mom and dad.

  So I put on the Piggy mask and went to visit my new homeroom teacher (and, it turned out, my new everything-else teacher), Ms. Landres. She’d been in the employ of the school system for decades and had all the mechanical add-ons to prove it. Gears in her eyes. All the better to see us with. Gears in her heart. All the better to hate us with.

  When I tell people about it now, I’m told I shouldn’t be surprised I got Expelled. Maybe it all started on September 1st, the day of our first class inspection (right after lunch and a fire drill). The first day I saw Ms. Landres’s Scaramouch mask. The day I pissed her off by calling it a Bird mask.

  “I’m not a filthy animal like you, Swine. Now repeat after me: Scar-a-mouch,” she’d snarled, glaring down at me with those gear-eyes of hers.

  “Sc-scare-a-Moose,” I’d stammered, my voice muffled under the papier-mâché Piggy mask.

  “Close enough, you worthless Piggy!” she’d said just before she hocked an oily loogie onto my new school dress. The rest of the Piggy Class broke out in a chorus of condescending snorts and squeals.

  After that, I did everything Ms. Landres said and limited my communication with the other kids to a stray whisper every other day or so. “Stop looking at me,” I’d croak.

  I’d learned my lesson, I thought. I wasn’t about to call her Scaramouch mask a Bird mask anymore. I would just do my best to be a good Piggy and blend in. On inspection days, in particular, that was the best strategy.

  It happened on November 1st. The first of the month, just a couple of weeks shy of Fall Break. Ms. Landres hissed directions for us to line up for inspection, boy-girl-boy-girl, same as always this day of the month, at high noon. Each of us stood in queue, struggling to project the aura of the quintessential papier-mâché Piggy.

  Ms. Landres’s gear-wheel-eyes churned with deliberate machination on such days. They made slow, safe-tumbler sounds. Click-click-click-click-click—each “click” an indication of her sensation, her perception, her judgment of us. Each click rendered the true status of our souls harder and harder to hide.

  “Scara-you-scara-me-scara-mouche!” the braver, less browbeaten Piggies had whispered to one another at the bus stop that morning. Although they seemed well on their way to Pigginess, I took solace in thinking that they must have had at least some human kid still in them (to defuse their dread with a lame joke). After all, Piggies don’t whistle past the graveyard.

  If we passed inspection, Ms. Landres would shriek that we were (in her singular but sufficient opinion) “Piggy!”

  “Piggy!” Ms. Landres hollered with approval as she stared into the soul of Natalie Simmons. Then Natalie smiled and snorted and skipped off to her seat.

  “Piggy!” Ms. Landres yipped as she took a quick glance at Aiden Addison—a Piggy so brimming with Pigginess that inspection itself seemed an unnecessary formality. He squealed long and longingly, crawling back to his seat.

  Then she got to me. That mean old hag placed one gnarled arthritic finger under my chin and brought my reluctant eyes to hers. I looked up, past the Scaramouch mask, into her eye-gears. Gears that started to go faster. Gears that seemed able to ground up my soul.

  “Not Piggy enough!” she wailed, reaching her claws into the holes of my mask and nearly scratching my eyeballs with her ragged, untrimmed nails in the process. Her gears clicked away faster still, like a roller coaster approaching the plunge. Click-click-click-click-click-click-click. “No! No! Not Piggy enough!” Click-click. “No! No! Not Piggy enough!” she roared. She yanked for all she was worth, unmasking me.

  For a few moments I just stood there, adjusting to the odd, unwelcome kiss of air against my cheeks. Just stoo
d there, not understanding the implications of the unmasking.

  “Expelled! Expelled!” Ms. Landres screeched, her eyes clicking with manic judgment. She pushed a red button on her desk.

  My face flushed. My face ached. My face must have expressed, at that moment, all the aggregate horrors encountered during my days in Piggy class. I don’t know how long I stood there, stunned still, until I heard the first slap of the Enforcer’s boot against the linoleum floor. That reminded me of all the agonies (both of the flesh and of the soul) awaiting me.

  I ran.

  Ran out of the high school, pulse pumping, arms pumping, my face ablaze with the wince-worthy pain induced by air rushing onto it. Air hitting raw nerve. The extra weight I’d put on since September jiggled around my midsection.

  I ran past the ball field, past the tree line, and splashed into the shallow creek nearby. I’d heard somewhere on TV that if you did that it would make it hard for someone to track you; that your scent would disappear. And disappear is exactly what I wanted to do.

  I ran along the soft creek bottom, splashing for a bit, nervous that what the Enforcer’s hounds couldn’t smell the Enforcer himself would plainly hear. I decided after more running that I’d best make it to land. There was a cemetery nearby, and then some woods past that. Where I’d go after that, I did not know.

  I made a leap out of the creek onto the waiting bank and slipped. My new girth pulled me backward, and I fell into the water. The splash of water onto my face stung like a hundred bee stings. I yelped. My fall kicked up a vomit of sediment from the sandy creek bottom, and minnows scattered in its wake. As the water stilled, I caught a rippling reflection of myself.

  My face was scarred and deformed, with nerves and muscles visible (and throbbing) under my eyes and cheeks. But even with that mess, I could see a few suggestions of Pigginess. My nose had become more upturned than it ever had been before, and it had grown in length about half an inch. I could see that it had begun to resemble a snout. Likewise, my ears possessed a suggestion of pointedness. I’d gotten a double chin.

  But it struck me that there was something about my transformation that had gone awry. That Ms. Landres had been right, if not in her pedagogy then in her perception, that I was “not Piggy enough!” It was as though the mask had suggested the change to my facial features, but my face—by some vestigial sense of fixed identity—had compromised. Had talked back to the mask. Had said “This far, no further.”

  Looking down at my reflection, I felt the whole world wobble. The aptitude test had said I’d make a good Piggy, but there I sat, looking into a reflection that at best seemed like some sort of Piggy-abortion. I began sobbing. I’d failed. I’d been Expelled. This meant disgrace for my family. Mom had already told me that if I washed out and didn’t fulfill my potential, I shouldn’t bother coming back home. She said that if I did come home, she’d have no choice but to turn me in.

  What could I do? If I could have found a way to drown myself right there, in the foot or so of creek, I would have.

  Instead I crawled up the creek bank and ran. Past the cemetery, past the woods, darting behind one house and another to catch my breath and evade detection. It was this way, sleeping in cornfields and stealing melons, that I survived as I found my way out of town. To the city.

  II. Freak-Catcher’s Modeling School

  When you’re young, Expelled, and of ambiguous species, you end up surviving in some of the worst possible ways. You are, after all, a fugitive. Even worse, you’re naïve and willing to glom onto any facsimile of family. You’re willing to set aside gut feelings about people you’d ordinarily see as shady because you are, after all, a freak.

  You buy into society’s hype about The Expelled. You learn to stop trusting yourself. You trust clichés instead (“beggars can’t be choosers,” “any port in a storm”).

  So it was that I ended up with Freak-Catcher.

  He fancied himself an underground artist. He taunted the authorities by taking grainy photographs of The Expelled and posting them on telephone poles in the arts district. Freak-Catcher and his wife (Freak-Watcher, they called her) “discovered” me scrounging through the trash outside a trendy artist’s restaurant. They offered me a free meal and a place to stay the night if I’d participate in a photo session.

  By then fall had turned to winter. The temperature had plunged to ten degrees, and the thin, calf-length sweater I’d recycled from the trash wasn’t cutting it. Meals recycled from the trash weren’t cutting it either. Still, the idea of trusting Freak-Catcher to photograph me and simultaneously keep my location a secret from the authorities gave me pause.

  After all, Freak-Catcher wasn’t a freak. That is, no matter how much of an affinity he had for The Expelled, he wasn’t one. He liked to tell us (over and over) that his aptitude test had told him that he was to be an artist, but I doubted that the aptitude test told anyone to be an artist. Aptitude tests just weren’t like that.

  Besides, he didn’t exactly dress the way I expected an artist to dress. He wore a black leather jacket over top of a grease-stained NASCAR T-shirt. He bragged on having been a sailor once, and he wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a mop top. He said he could be my new dad, and that Freak-Watcher could be my new mom. Together, they’d take pictures of me.

  After hearing his proposal I stood there, paralyzed.

  “Trust him—he won’t turn you in,” a voice said from behind me. “He never snitched on me or Huck.” The voice sounded young and deep, exuding confidence. Confidence was a commodity in short supply in my life, so I turned to meet it.

  The boy was maybe a year or two older than me. He had a long face with big teeth, prominent nostrils, and bulging eyes. Bulging eyes that just kept looking down at me from a height of about six-foot-four. Eyes that wouldn’t let go. At that moment, I felt relieved that poverty had taken off the weight I’d gained during my brief time in high school. From the moment he opened his mouth, I liked this Horse-abortion-boy (even if his face didn’t exactly conform to universal standards of handsomeness). I liked that he’d noticed me.

  “Freak-Catcher rescues us,” the tall Horse-boy said.

  A much-shorter dude with a bushy, blood-red Mohawk and sagging jowls emerged from behind the Horse-boy and made a coughing, crowing sound that I thought might have been a laugh. “He recycles us,” the Rooster-boy said.

  Huck the Rooster-boy, Champ the Horse-boy, and I only spent three months with Mama Freak-Watcher and Daddy Freak-Catcher before they kicked us out. I know it sounds mean, but I don’t think they meant it that way. I think they just got bored with us. I think that the entire city got bored with us. We were overexposed. We weren’t even newsworthy anymore (Freak-Catcher had showed us the clippings back when we’d been the talk of the town). Even an underground artist had to introduce enough novelty to keep the audience interested.

  A month or two after he evicted me, I noticed that Freak-Catcher had moved on to using transvestite hookers in his photography. Champ had to explain to me what a transvestite hooker was. We didn’t have those in the country. Once again, Freak-Catcher’s art was the stuff of headlines. One day, when I glanced up a telephone pole and saw Freak-Catcher’s grainy rendering of a transvestite’s meaty man-foot in a high-heeled shoe, I had to stop and wonder: Had the transvestite’s aptitude test told her she’d be a transvestite?

  Anyway, three months wasn’t a lot, but it was enough time for me to learn the ropes of life in the city. Champ and Huck seemed to know what to do when we got kicked out. They’d heard of an acting troupe that sometimes hired creatures like us to portray burn victims, ghouls, and other monstrosities. The pay wasn’t much, of course, but between the three of us we could afford a shabby one-bedroom apartment within walking distance to the theater. We had just enough left over to buy the cheapest store-brand bread and eggs at the market.

  III. Industrial Arts (Today)

  We’ve lived this way for about three years now. During that time, I’ve played every variety of disfigure
d monster the theater has to offer. I’ve had every combination of wild, half-bestial sex with Champ, Huck, and any other Expelled creature I’ve run into.

  I think the only reason I’ve never gotten pregnant is that I like to party pretty hard. Okay—extremely hard. I’ve tried every flavor of liquor (in copious amounts, each and every night) and have sampled enough pills to start a pharmacy. Whenever I pop one into my mouth I tell myself that I’m taking the cure for my freakishness and I pretend—for a half-second—that the pills undo the work of that high school mask. Sometimes, if I take the right combination, I get high enough that they seem (for a few minutes) to do just that.

  I try to not show my face during broad daylight, and that’s why theater—the ultimate second-shift job—works for me.

  Yeah, I know it’s not the greatest life in the world. But I’m pretty sure that it’s better than live dissection.

  I mean, I do want more than this hand-to-mouth existence. I think I want Champ’s baby someday. But that will mean changes. I’ll need to stop drinking and pill-popping. We’ll need more than bread and eggs to feed a child. Champ knows all this. He wants to ditch Huck and get a place for the two of us, but it’s awfully expensive and dangerous for two Expelled folks like ourselves. I’m convinced, though, that we finally need to drop all pretense of being artists and redouble our efforts to find the niche we never did in high school. Maybe we could even find more than just a niche. Maybe we could find redemption.

  Champ agrees with this wholeheartedly. Today he brought home a brochure for a local industrial arts college. “No more struggling, babe,” he said. Promises abounded amidst the brochure’s glossy pages. New careers. New vistas.

  One could be a piston, a spark plug, crank shaft, or rod. One could even aspire to be an entire wheel onto oneself (someday). Perhaps a gear, or whole collection of gears. Our education will require multiple surgeries, the transformation of some aspects of our bodies into a liquid state, and the pouring of those parts into molds.