Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page A

not robbed her of that ability.
    “‘But look at me!’ the cannibal’s lover cries out. ‘I am hideous. I am a monster!’
    “But the cannibal kisses her and wipes away her tears and assures the girl that she is even more beautiful now than on the first day they met. Every single scar, every amputation, every morsel they have shared between them, she tells her lover, has only served to perfect her. Before she was, at most, what any woman might be. And where is the glory in that?’ she asks her lover. ‘Where is the beauty or the splendor in being no more than the progeny of insensible, uncalculating Mature?’””
    And then you fall silent, looking suddenly very pleased with yourself. I watch your grey eyes and slowly nod my head. “Is there more?” I ask.
    “No,” you reply. “There is no need of any more than that. How could this ending possibly be rendered any more impeccable?”
    “Are you going to untie me before you sleep?” I ask, no longer particularly interested in how my story—which, I know, is no longer mine—has or hasn’t ended. The muscles between my shoulder blades and down the length of my back have begun to knot and cramp. I need to piss, and would prefer not to do so in the bed. But it would not be completely unlike you to leave me this way until the sun has risen and set and you have some further need of me.
    You nod, but your eyes are watching the window and the first faint rays of morning leaking in through the fabric. “So, I’ve found you at last, you old sinner,” you say, your voice gone as dry as an autumn wind and as cold as a mid-winter’s sun. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

Subterraneus
    Below the streets, and then below all that lies below the streets—basements and sewers, cellars and subway tunnels, lines for gas and water and electricity, cable television, the crawlways dug two hundred years ago by smugglers and pirates and those whose motives have been entirely forgotten. Below asphalt and grey concrete and moldering brick and sedimentary bedrock so honeycombed and hollowed that it’s surely a miracle the earth does not simply collapse beneath the combined weight of skyscrapers and automobiles and however many millions of human beings come and go overhead. Here, then, below all that lies below, is this ancient void carved not by the labor of picks, nor dynamite, nor machines, but by the hands (if we may call such appendages hands) of the ones who so long ago forsook the sun and moon that both are now little more than doubtful half-remembrances. The weathered limestone walls glow faintly with the chartreuse light of phosphorescent fungi, at least a dozen species of various grotesque shapes, found nowhere in the world but this cavern, aligned with the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, yet likely to remain forever unknown to prying, categorizing science.
    And those who come here now, those few who find their way down, they come by choice, each and every one of them. None are ever brought here. None are lured, and none are shown the way. None are ever dragged kicking and screaming like the victims in some B-grade horror film. A month might pass between visitations, or a decade. The ones who keep this pit are patient and have long since learned to wait, relying upon providence and happenstance and whatever incomprehensible drive does, on occasion, lead one from above to seek them out.
    She was half dead, by the time she found them, and now she is at best only half again that alive. Her name is Beryl, by chance—or not by chance—and for three years has she seen this deep place in dreams, for three years has she heard their voices and seen their faces. She hangs now suspended a few feet above the mire and stinking, motionless water that is their burrow. She did not resist when they came to her with the steel hooks and chains, because she’d seen all that in dreams, as well. As the antique hand winch—itself a marvel of rust and Colonial-era