THE HOUSE OF SCALPEL VALENTINES
(from the secret diary of Tiffany Twisted)
There are many faceless drones like you. But there is only one of me. And you will never ever learn my secret name. Acquiring knowledge of faerie monsters like me is like going against the law of gravity. You think that maybe that you’ll have me, when I’m pinned beneath you like a rare butterfly, or perching pretty in the gilded cage you have bought for me. But then some strange light will glint through the chinks, and you will realise that you have seen but one room in an enormous house. And you will become lost in that house. You will even hear others, trapped like you, in the house that is me. You will all avoid each other like the plague, those of you who are caught. Each prisoner will secure their territory and then wait for doom, both obsessively curious about the other rooms yet terrified to the core to see them. For to see those places is to understand that they belong to others; to understand that I was never yours in the first place. I am a monument to futility, to absurdity, to the great cosmic comedy that is creation. And you will wait for death inside my webs little, shiny beetle, waiting with your hands drenched in the blood of friends and strangers. Waiting for me to send word through my vines, or visit you in your sleep like a vampire.
But enough of the witchety-routine, let’s instead talk about Alex (the corpse). Slap a mosquito and there’s always a moment when you’re not sure if the blood on your hand is yours. Poor thing. I picked him out of a photo because his eyes were an almost colourless blue. It happens, like stepping on snails in the dark. We would drink latte’s in sunny cafe’s and fuck to classical music compilations. It was the kind of intimate thing you lose after a few days, like a rented ballgown. Tentacles disappear – the movie ends, all you are left with is popcorn. The first Alex ever saw of me was a byte-size, grainy picture in an anonymous electronic gallery. ‘Tiffany Twisted’ was the rather unbelievable name I had assumed in this gallery. The cosmic absurdity I spoke of earlier was present in that eskimo pie of a pseudonym. A rather sugary feeling which suggested an inexplicable private joke; a jibe in which the rest of mankind was somehow not included. Only one monochrome image of my smiling lips guarded the threshold, but it was enough to pique Alex’s interest and make him want to creep deeper into the saccharine mystery I had invented. He wasn’t alone. Thousands of names lined the ephemeral, neon shrine I had erected to my body. Some were never sure if I was a robot, but they all requested access anyway. The anonymity of these systems brought the Jeckyll up to the flesh. And those who ate regularly of this electric vine had long since shod their old protocols. Repulsive honesties spilled over into everyday interactions, tainting reality like a subtle, yet inescapable infection. We trawled these mind-pools like those despicable, translucent creatures one see’s in undersea documentaries. Those see-though faces full of glassy teeth and captivation-organs who trawl their whole lives away in search of endless new ways to soothe their savage appetites. Nature was alive in this invisible, somehow cellular world. The jagged, hungry aspect of nature which see’s creatures eating each other in the filth of creation.
Thoughts like this must have occupied Alex, when first he saw my smile beckon at him, from the other side of nowhere. It was a dense night as I recall and he was on his phone in the city, killing time before a meeting. The sordid, anodyne heaviness of the urban nightmare was weighing down particularly on him that night. He took refuge in his electric universe, in his many identities and the fleeting, intellectual transactions which occupied them. But even these familar opiates were not enough to numb him to the inevitablity of what he had in store for himself. You see, he had planned to meet a lover later for dinner in Soho and was preparing to end the liason. They had been flogging a dead horse for several months now, attending forgettable films and indulging in the kind of clinical sex favoured by glossy suburban publications. She had a terrible, toothpaste-white smile which, he claimed, made him often contemplate killing her. She worked in advertising and joked about lying for a living. In two weeks they would have forgotten about each other and he would spend his seed on electronic shrines like mine, till the next episodic fling shuffled wearily in. Permamanancy was threatening him with immanent collapse. He was ripe for the plucking. You can imagine his vague excitement when the request to enter Tiffany Twisted’s magical gallery was not only accepted, but accompanied by a short message:
[My GPS app tells me yur in the same city. I like yur eyes. Want to tangle?]
I imagine that all men find this directness titillating. For all he knew the pretty monochrome face he was communicating with was a sixty year old pervert in a hotel on the other side of the world. I once knew a girl who took great pleasure in arranging anonymous liasons with men. She would bake them in promises but fail to consumate their eventual plans to meet. She told me that she would loiter across the street from the arranged rendevous point and surreptitiously film them waiting. She told me that it made her feel strangely fulfilled, watching them grow more and more uncomfortable as the glaze of fantasy dried out, revealing the bitter flesh beneath. She told me that she would often watch these recordings in times of stress and take great comfort in them. Stories of this sort were plentiful. They had hardened boys like Alex, forcing them to skirt risk like a disease. All those boys who thought themslves such clever rascals by avoiding reality are those who maintain an alleycat prestige in it’s deficit. They, like so many others, preffered to play the voyeur, remaining on on the boundary of real events. And like most modern men, Alex was a coward. His experience was limited to the intricacy of his lies. Constant social obsessions with the notion of substance had only made facetious secret agents of the majority of ‘that other gender’. Society had perfected the concept of substance and they had constructed a thousand escape hatches back to the empty pavilion of the inner self. Exposure was taboo; the bull-ring of Fame was testimony to this. Everyone’s alternate identity was famous to some degree, but we were all still after-images of ourselves, living in the ghost-hotel of the shadows we had created. Alex’s grim liason with his soon-to-be-ex lover was testimony to this persistant perpetuation of illusion. He and his beau were running out of hidey-holes, and a new refuge was desperately needed. But such is the pasteboard upon which the modern lover builds their life. Over-population had tuned natural mating responses into a disease of inertia. The inevitable outcome could only be extinction. That evening found Alex unusually grim, doused in thoughts such as these, almost suicidal (as his vanity would prefer to say). Temptations of obliteration flickered inside him like rogue cats. He needed some form of distraction – And what better distraction than a pretty package of candy? He found himself replying automatically to my ghostly monochrome voice.
[Sure - I'm free in an hour. Lets meet]
He must have put his phone back in his pocket, not expecting a reply. But he had to pull it out only a moment later.
[where] I asked, smacking down the glove.
He arranged to meet me at a cocktail bar and began to scour all the information he could have gleaned about me. He knew that I had been going through all the online pictures of him, picking at his background life like a magpie. My tracking devices registered him tracking me, as I rifled quickly through some of his personal information. The reality of the situation would have begun to occur to him by then. He would suddenly begin to feel a little excited. The drossness of his mood would dissipate and he would feel vaguely thankful toward the mystery girl for stroking his ego across the night. His doubts however would remain; like ink-stains on an otherwise pleasing picture. In all likelihood, to him, I was just a bored teenager. This is what his mind would say. It would tell him that I was some little zombie looking for caustic antidotes to her immediate boredom. I mean he wasn’t particularly attractive, either phsyically or financially. If asked to describe himself I could imagine him saying that he was ‘expendable’ (with a rehearsed smile of course). He probably anticipated a drink or two and some meaningless flirtation before this little fantasy-teen of his mind’s eye got cold feet and vanished into the wasteland of short-term memory. But even that would be enough to lighten the spell of inertia which had clogged his evening. I was like a neon nun of the underworld. I could wipe away misery with one flash of my wand. It wasn’t any wonder people thanked me so profusely after abusing the images of my body. It was in the nature of men to worship the eternal feminine. Even misogyny was a bastardised version of this lustful sacrament. He cancelled his meeting and began to walk to the cocktail rendevousz, just like a good little pagan.
The place was in Kingly street. The walls and ceilings were plated in LED screens and spacious video booths lined the walls in the manner of some futuristic, orbital diner. Within the enclosure of the booth, one could toggle through background scenery and ambient music to create a variety of atmospheres and moods. He went in, ordered a drink and thumbed an image of the rolling sea onto the walls around him. I was watching from the bar. He opted for a beat-less shakuhachi soundtrack while high-resolution waves crashed soundlessly against an illusory distance. This isolated and superficially spiritual mantle was of course, a common starting point with many men upon first meeting a woman. The agony of the would-be pilot, or the cowboy betrothed to his own special electronic horses. The predictability of the act probably nauseated him, but he was obviously too demotivated to court orginality. He spotted me almost immediately as I detached from my perch. Many people do not resemble themselves in photographs. They manufacture facial expressions and body alignments harvested from the outer gardens of transmitted imagery. But their natural inclinations/faces always betray them in real life. I, however, had been educated by witches. In the kingdom of predatory insects and spiders, superficial attractiveness is sometimes the most fatal weapon. And it is a craft not lightly undertaken. I had been shown how to fold myself in, like a magician’s handkerchief. In appearance, I was a perpetually maintained hologram of Tiffany. I wore my Daemon familiar like an automatic illusion. And I held myself behind this forcefield at all times, letting the occasional wild feather of personality jut from beneath the armour of her, like a sliver of insubordination. Tiffany’s hair was platinum, bordering on a pale gold or silver. Her face was always doll-like in its cultivated glassiness. This threw all my emotions into focus by avoiding them. Undercurrents whiplashed about like caged fish, threatening constant breakage (Such is the gravity of high magic). But Tiffany’s enforced blankness created psychic screens which deflected the thoughts of others like a water-tight surface. It was a vaguely magnetic technique which Madre Sanguina the witch had taught me in the casinos of the Cote D’Zur. Nothing like a Blackjack table to sharpen a girl up like a knife. Alex saw me and I crossed over. We shook hands and I sat, smiling vaguely. He was ill at ease, threatened by my casual command.
“How did you find me?” he asked as I ordered a drink.
“I’m a friend of Jessica Brandt,” I lied.
Jessica was a good-time girl I knew he knew from the boat party circuit. I had met her once at a dress-up one or two weeks ago and she had pointed him out in passing. I remembered his eyes – and London is a smaller town than you would think (especially in profile-world). She told me that they had slept together and that he had a rather pleasant cucumber-like cock. We were talking one-night-stands at the bar and she gave up the most outrageous details. She also mentioned that he was disease-free so I knew I could go in guns blazing and keep him on edge. My mention of Jessica instantly quelled whatever reservations he had about the stranger infront of him. He sort of melted into it. He now had references and vainly assumed that he understood my motivations (that Jessica had boasted about his prowess or something). We were suddenly in second game, past the darkness of the woods and playing sexual tennis.
“Is your name really Tiffany?” he oiled.
“No, of course not.”
My drink arrived; pale liquid set amongst lacerations of ice.
“Do you know what this is?” I sipped, switching the background walls to the gaping vertigo of a Grand Canyon flyover.
“I’m not sure,” he captioned. “A Vodka mixer of some kind?”
“It’s Shochu,” I answered pertly. “A Japanese spirit brewed in clear glass casks. You can drink it straight all night without getting a hangover.”
“You accent is strange,” he frowned. “Where are you from?”
“Africa,” I smiled. “Where the wild things walk.”
He smiled back. And some inner stop watch started ticking down.
He had a flat in Kensington, an address he was relatively arrogant about. I wasn’t impressed, though pretended to be. We took a cab and didn’t talk much. He said I was supple for a beautiful girl. He told me that in his limited experience, cosmetically attractive girls were like porcelain figures. You could place them anywhere and they would adorn the space around them like a shrine of some kind. But if you bent them they would always break.
“You’re strong…” he muttered, locked beneath the grinding axis of my pale limbs.
A flicker of sweat caught like syrup in the minimal light. It left my shoulderblade and licked at his eye like a bluebottle. I laughed. In the confined space it was a rather brutal coughing sound, like
the bark of a hyena.
“Yes,” I gritted from the shadows above.
“I’m very strong.”
He wasn’t fit enough for me. He said that it had been a draining day and that the stress had worn him down to almost nothing. I rolled off him and crawled over to my things. In the blue shafts of light, he was like some sort of beached fish. He glistened as I moved, watching me, perplexed. I extracted a dark glass ampoule from my purse and turned a frozen face to him.
“Cum in this for me,” I whispered.
He was about to protest, so I slid back over the sheets like a cuttlefish. My muscular fingers coiled and clutched around him, flicking off the moist latex membrane. My mouth must have moved like a hot, open wound because primal responses flamed vividly in the darkness. ‘She is milking me’ I felt him think, in a split-second of delirious telepathy, ‘milking me like an animal’. Then something small and potent burst, emptying the whole night into the small bottle which I angled carefully between his thighs. Whatever last vestiges of strength he had left, drained away like gutter water. I retracted, an underwater thing and changed in the darkness. My clothing rustled, as his eyes kept closing with sullen heaviness. He listened to my heels as they clocked down the passage, entering the kitchen. The light of the fridge blushed the darkness open like an eye. And I could hear him listening as I drank ice water in the pale light. Glass after glass, clinking and swallowing. He fell into a dream which he would later tell me about. A vision of glaciers and large roaming octopi which were hunting the last survivors of mankind; hunting them for their blood.
A word or two about reptiles before I tell you about The House of Scalpel Valentine’s (and the cum thing). It was reptiles who got us all into this mess in the first place. Once the world was ruled by insects and plants. No birds, no animals- zip. All those things were in the sea. The sea was where it was at baby – Mama Eternal, the lap of the Lady herself. But Those reptiles had another idea of course. It was the bugs that did it. Those juicy, buzzing kingdoms were thriving like fast-food franchises up in the world above. Can you imagine a world ruled by insects? Some strange sea monsters did. They changed they way they breathed to get at the gourmet shit. That’s how intense a reptile can be. They crawled out of the ooze and colonized. The rest is speculative history. We are the natural progression of insatiable appetites. And this is why we have no future.
Once mothers ruled the world. The universe was one gorgeous tapestry and the Goddess-Spider from whence we sprung was worshipped accordingly. It was like a return to the sea, that time of feminine power. The reptile in us managed to harmonise with the maternal and thrive…Oh we are such pretty pagans, we Sisters of the Scalpel. We remember that time like it was yesterday. And we worship a secret face of the Holy Virgin, Our Lady of Sorrows; the Surgeon Mary. We live in a dark age, you must know that. Look out a window and see the future, freezing on your ledge like some mutilated cat. Once we understood that our bodies where given to us by the Earth and our Spirits by the stars. Now we are the crumbs under Satan’s fingernails. Alot of people took to hidey holes and secret systems. I tried alot of them, especially in California. But I settled for the Sisters when I met Sanguina. She brought me to London and got me out of the mirror-verse which threatens every girl. We had a big house in Hampstead, on Templewood avenue, quite near West Heath road. It was a fortress and used to belong to a diamond magnate. There were two towers and too many rooms to count. The upper floors were reserved for new girls, who weren’t allowed to leave for nine months (the time it takes to be born anew). And yes, we had rituals and special robes and all that stuff which makes every cult so darn special. Every belief-system has it’s fancy dress. I got there and was buzzed in by the guards. Celeste was in the kitchen overseeing the preparation of lunch. Large, white slabs of marlin lay around like tombstones. I asked her if she would help me perform a sigil ritual when she was done and went up to the Lab. It wasn’t really a laboratory, but we called it the Lab because everything in it was just such an operation. I turned on the radiators full blast, disrobed and washed myself in an adjoining steamroom. I bathed with a bucket of steaming spring water and giant chunks of lemony glycerine. Then I took a good half hour to scrub every inch of myself down with rock salt and rose petals – to get into that spell casting groove. When Celeste came in I was lying naked on the heated black marble altar, half in and out of sleep. This state, which we Witchies call the Liminal Zone, is a tough place to get to and maintain. Don’t get me wrong, we all fuzz into it around sleepy-time. But to get into it and stay there took a little sweat. I learned the Liminal Gnosis on a boat in the Meditteranean. I would swim every day and then lie for hours in the sun, sometimes well into the evening glow. I would doze, trying to catch myself in the webby nexus of pre-sleep so I could hold it around me like a rare gossamer garment. It took some weeks, but I got my sickle shaped scout’s badge on that boat. Now I was slippery in the spell of hypnogogia; my limbs weightless and warm, my mind expanding like a slow balloon. The black bottle of harvest-sperm was in it’s niche beside me and all was quiet in the Lab. I could hear distant, sparse traffic and the trees on the Heath. Everything was tuned to a terminal relaxation up in the Lab. The dark wood pannelling and black pile soaked up the all the sounds like blotting paper. Celeste disappeared into the washroom and emerged later, unclothed and steaming. I was so in and out that she seemed to quiver between two images of herself. Her slanted eyes made four and every sound that came off her was as crisp and freshly peeled as a sweet wrapper. She uncapped scented oils and began to massage me in a rather pornographic way. This might seem pretty B-Grade to the casual esoteric, but I assure you, kinky arousal is Gateway Number One to Liminal Land. So it wasn’t long before I was all cookies and cream. Sexual electricity had gathered all over me in a kind of waspish, pink static, and I manouvered and swirled it around in buoyant mind-tides. Sleep came at me occasionally, like a starving pet. It snuck up, inflicting bouts of vertigo. But I was a veteran of Never Never Land and held fast between worlds, grinning like an imp. Celeste had an expert touch and inflicted the kind of secret pleasures only witches know. My comatose moaning and ooh-ing and ah-ing slowly started to turn into strange words. These ecstatic vocalizations; this Glossolalia, fountained out of my sleeper’s mouth. The sonic vibrations became visual, forming into cubic shapes above me. It was like watching sugar crystallize in a highly illuminated solution. I slowly focused my electric sex-sugar into the long video form of Tiffany Twisted. She grinned down blonde fire above me, turning in space like a hologram. Somewhere in another world, Celeste uncapped Alex’s rehydrated ejaculate. She rubbed it into my solar plexus, spiking it with a lashing of Myrrh-y oils and mentrual blood. The sticky, sulphuric substance broiled on me like an egg as I saw Tiffany whip down with a sly little purr. She regarded the offering for a moment before squeezing open like a kitten; lapping up the long glowing strands of vital energy from the saucer of my stomach. A cord tightened across the city; from Tiffany’s puppet finger, through the lens of my perfect tummy and through the streets to Alex. And as soon as Tiffany was fed, Celeste’s warm palms left me. I back-vaulted into luminous dreams of underwater palaces. Mysterious places which I somehow felt I’d visited before. And all through this, Tiffany Twisted held my hand, wafting above me like a radio-angel from le Universe Perverse.
I woke up satisfied and yummy, curled like whitebait across the marble slab. By now it was dusk. I could see a thin red line smouldering behind the branches outside. I left the Lab and took a bubblebath in one of the boudoirs upstairs. I came down when it was dark. Some girls were in the lounge flicking through magazines and trying on expensive pairs of shoes. Someone was playing a harp in one of the downstairs chambers. I went into the kitchen and found a teenage girl eating a sandwich in a tracksuit. She waved, nibbling at her olive bread like a mouse. Long furry angel wings had been harnessed onto her, and they bumped the counters whenever she moved. I opened the walk-in fridge and extracted some marlin left over from lunch. We ate together in silence and then I left, lighting a cigarette at the door.
So I’m one bullet-proof chiquita huh? Well, even titanium Barbie Dolls have their one fatal crack. It’s never all blueberries and blue-steel (unfortunately). Karma has a way of nosing in like a sacred snake, invading the nest and eating all your eggs while you lie helpless, watching. I could lie and just play peachy, but this is a secret diary and all the dirt and dead skin has to be scrubbed off and scrutinized. For starters, I’m not as heartless as I play. My heart was locked up in a cage. And the name of that cage was Etienne Juniper (and no, it’s not his real name). None of my Scalpel sisters knew about Etienne. And I think I even managed to keep him a secret from Sanguina. You might think it’s impossible to keep secrets from a witch like Sanguina, but let me tell you now: Nothing’s impossible! I met him when I was a complex gypsy of a thing, lost at sea and chainsmoking by rainy windows. At first it was just because he was so pretty. And Etienne was a pretty little prickle-pear – all pinstripes and werewolves. And he knew how to fuck his way into a girl’s heart. Alot of boy’s think they know how to pull the love-lever. But let me tell you it’s a one in a million. Most girl’s don’t even know that they have a lever. But when a lady finds her system controls, she wants the best car on the block. Now firstly, Etienne was genetically blessed. And many ‘sensitive’, oestrogen-mimic enfused, mag-reading males might dispute this endowment factor, but let me assure you: the love-garage is built to spec. And no matter how sweet or touching the flame, it all boils down to animal courtship rituals. Mother Nature is in the driver’s seat down here on Planet Dirt, and let’s not forget it. So, like I said before, human mating rituals are now the evolutionary joke of the century – But despite this fine comedy, primal programming still held the biggest megaphone. At the end of the day (down by the inescapable pond), the female frog is still going to choose the male frog with the biggest croak. It’s built in baby. There are secret buttons all along the inside of my kitten; set out like an express elevator all the way up to the womb room. And each cosmic button has to be activated to achieve escape velocity. It therefore takes a fine cat-burglar to lockpick the universe (and having quality gear is just the first step). I mean even a stallion has to know how to jump! What’s the use having a Ferrari if you’re only going to drive it to the shop? No babe, a machine needs to be taken down to the highway and opened up. And that’s the secret sauce with boy’s and their toys: sensitivity to the secret rhythms. No man can enter the Temple of Venus without first recognising the Anima within, the triple faced Goddess which bequeathed the body unto him. And that combination of self-knowledge and material ability was rare as blue butterflies. And Etienne had both in spades. There was a snag of course (there always is). His profusion of knowledge came with a heartlessness which was positively fictitious. He took his time with me, soaking up my dry heart in glowing slashes of textbook romance and play-play love. I was young, lonely and foolish and fell right into the web. It reached the stage when I would do anything to be near him. He took me down to the bottom of the well and I learned about the blackness of love-mud. I used to call him ‘Frankie Teardrop’ because he’d play the song sometimes when we did it and I started to cry. He had it on an old white cassette with the word ‘SUICIDE’ scrawled across the plastic in silver marker. That tape got so chewed after six months, you could hardly hear the words, only Alan Vega’s occasional jagged scream. It was Lisbon in 1999. I was eighteen, reading Neil Gaiman and dying my hair every second week. The future looked bleak. Everyone had end-of-the-world fever and I was in love with a secret cyclops. I found out about Etienne’s pirhana-side from a friend who waitressed in the waterfront area. She’d eavesdropped on him and some of his port buddies while they played cards. The whole web began to unravel but I didn’t care, I was besotted. It turned out that my Frankie Teardrop was a rare fish indeed, one of those homosexual barracudas who turned over rich housewives for guilt money. After two years of fucking desperate debutantes and loaded ladies, Etienne learned almost everything he needed to know about getting a girl onto her knees. He studied the art of pleasuring women with a white-hot battery of hate. And his application of romance was diabolical. His conquest of the female erogenous zones was approached with clinical detachment, and a with a veiw to material gain. He was an exquisite misogynist, and each heart he invaded gave him a spiteful satisfaction beyond mere physical pleasure. Etienne had transgressed genders and arrived at some strange and demonic androgyne of the soul. Soon he would start seducing girls just for fun. He would enter into long and complicated relationships with them, hiding his heartless nature behind a chocolatey facade. This conflict of pleasures made him an outcast amongst the gay community. People argued that whichever way he cut it, he took more pleasure sleeping with women than men. No-one could understand him except me. And it made me love him all the more. I fell into that let’s-save-the-broken-bird syndrome, which so many girls got around the demonically possesed. Etienne became my special project, and so I fell in deeper. His ability to be honest with me and still maintain a sexually parasitic relationship opened up the red door of sadism. And it’s shocking what love can give a girl a taste for. He was in and out of my life for a decade, coming and going like a cyclone, keeping a long grip on the leash. I don’t know why, But I couldn’t deny him anything. I often hated him. But then he would smile and charm his way back into my bed. And whenever the tip of his devil cock knock knock knocked at the painful portal of my womb, it triggered some kind of physical response which went way beyond sense. He had all the crazy keys to me; my very own personal devil in velvet. So when he called and told me that he was in London I ran to him like a lost thing. It took just one phonecall to betray my oath to the Sisterhood – That’s how low and fickle I am. We started up again like an infection. He had a coke operation running in the party circuit and told me he had plans to start up a high-class, online escort agency. I knew what he had in mind for me and tossed it around before he even asked. I needed money and, in a way, my time with Sanguina had trained me for the shark tank. There were no accidents. And at moments of revelation, I somehow knew that the old Basque witch was still walking me through the wood, smiling at my false sense of privacy. Etienne had no idea about the Sisterhood and I played it weak and medoicre when I was around him. I told him I’d been here for a couple of years, writing copy for an ad agency and taking acting classes. He had no reason to disbelieve my story and set about degrading me with reptilian relish. He knighted me with the incredibly unimaginative name ‘Candy Glass’ and sent me to an out of work fashion photographer to get some lingerie shots done. He told me that he had to build an online escort profile and needed oiled-up pictures of me immediately. It all started with a metallic bang; a cold night in Maida Vale, on my knees in a white limousine, listening to hip-hop while an as-yet-unamed Turkish producer stuck his perfumed cock up my ass. Etienne must have enjoyed seeing that security camera footage. I couldn’t walk for two days, made over two grand in one night and decided to lay down some ground rules sharpish. Etienne was always wondering how much abuse it would take to chase me away, but I wasn’t about to break. God knows what would happen if I did. The rules of the universe would invert, polarities would shift. So we played our game of terrible chess. I took the calls, prepped my pussy and set about gorging Tiffany with the cream of London’s sleazy seed. And there’s nothing like fast food to make a daemon familiar grow big and strong. Tiffany grew larger in her astral sphere, easier to slip on than a fur coat, more ferocious than a tank full of white tigers.
I stopped at the apartment in Belgravia, went online and re-entered the artficial world. I kept this apartment exclusively for Candy and my Etienne cover story, and it often gave me a sort of, I don’t know, Monosodium Glutamate kind of feeling. Etienne had a date lined up for Candy at midnight. I unsealed my patent leather spike heels and microscopic Prada combo. I selected a diamond choker and made a hair and nail appointment (Rituals always fucked up my hair). I then decocted a Chinese Angelica potion, downed it and went to do my witchy stretches. I still had an hour to harmonise my meridians before zooting down to the 24hour hairdresser/manicurist which Etienne kept on ice for his bitches. I don’t smoke, but Candy Glass does. I would light up an Yves Saint Laurent by the window before I went out as Candy. And I often cackled as I blew smoke at the not too distant lights of the Grosvernor hotel. How the Sisters of the Scalpel would retch if they saw me now; a glazed up sweetmeat, all ready to play doll with all the dogs of the universe.
Candy is my name in the pink fur. Poison is my name when I hipswing. Loitering in the shiny boxes of elevators, smoking delirious curls outside red velvet doors. I move through people, shimmying hip-deep into the narrow, jelly-channels of nocturnal circulation; filter feeding myself to the animals who roam the galactic corridors of moonbase hotels. I drag fingers and thighs along every eye, as I tick night after night in the labyrinth; the splendid theatre of never-ending rooms. Candy’s origami fingers are stiff with gleaming hotels and baby oil. Her body moves like a construction of snakes and soft plastic. Candy is the the name of a girl who has no name. Who prefers to forget that she ever had a television addiction or a warm pillow to swim into. Candy is the name of sugar that has dissolved in water and reconstructed itself around whatever objects have drowned. Candy is sucked in the mouths of strangers and kept in boxes in bedroom containers; left on pillows as presents and eaten out of guilt.
Sometimes I am lost in the waters. Down in the deep shark tanks, suspended beneath the futuristic dream city. I float-out aimless in the medical depths while distant searchlights throw skyscraper pillars of high resolution into the endless successions of glass tank systems. Each room is a shark tank, each mark is a shark, every interaction a minefield and my throbbing heart a hydrogen bomb. I wear my black bottles of pilfered fluid like oxygen tanks while vast mantas of lost hope flicker out across the drowning people. Nobody really knows how old sharks in Sharkville are. I mean some sharks ate dinosaurs in the womb. Sharks are ancient visitors. They were around thousands of years before mr Tyrannosaurus Rex even evolved. I mean they have it down babe. And I eat sharks with my daemon, bumping against plexiglass planes like a weighted doll, slowly unclipping my skin to show sugar crystal bones. And the water floods into me, making my skeleton thinner with each swirl. Fleshtone erodes in syrupy tentacles and I dissolve into the murk and gloom, travelling in seams of sweetness which tiny parasites cling to and feed off. Candy is not a name which anyone would wish upon themselves. Because sugar rots your teeth. And people who lose their teeth have to suck their fluid foods behind closed doors. People who live off sugar are doomed to become insects; mutating in tiny rooms, feeling their organs cramp and rearrange as they bloat in the flickering lights. Hatching every night into a frenzy of technicolour vistas and peeling flesh palaces. Falling out of high and tiny windows and fluttering through the shambling carcasses of vast structures, vomiting over Candy to encourage dissolution. First: guilting into their switchblade situations in some feverish trenchcoat scene, then: spilling out the trenchcoat treasure in some airtight room. They unwrap back the glittery translucencies and strips of foil and shedded predator skins, trying to get at my soft center which need not be dissolved. But there is never a soft center in true candy. Candy is hard and glassy and needs to be shattered first to be properly engorged; eaten till sick with sticky fingers and scattered in broken pieces across a wilderness of burned carpets and heavy neon decay. Candy will pull out needle blowtorches and run them along her spine to melt herself for fun sometimes. Feeling the crystals in her back break apart into slag and tendrils which ooze out all over the tables and flowers like a lethal meltdown (Heavy smell of caramel tainting the air into poison gas…), Feeling arms and legs soften and run as she is consumed by the glittering insect which drops down violently from the walls and ceilings. Speeded up wings flutter against a white neon wall as the luxurious suite shakes and dislodges from its moorings; tumbling through endless rotting basements and sewer cathedrals to catch in the world of cobwebs beneath the streets. The distant tremors of approaching spiders inflicts tiny geometric earthquakes in the web strata. And the trampolining becomes rythmic and sickening as the figure in the trenchcoat writhes and gibbers in the hardening swamp of sugar. Old wooden cupboards clatter and trampoline as the walls are explored by an anemone of shiny stylus points and icy limbs. The spider licks tiny Tiffany lips, which are cusped by razor cheekbones. A crown of tiny eyes is set in her head. The spider gets in and taps the insect because that’s just what always spiders do, with a languid and mindless prescision. But spiders don’t eat Candy so I always just stand there watching, while the legs stilt and rearrange about me. Spiders don’t need sweets to catch things. Spiders are born without teeth. Mandibles give you fingertips in your mouth. And everything the spider say’s is in fact a hand, reaching out slowly to pull you in. And the mouth that the spider speaks through is mine.
I intercepted this broken English email which one of the Eastern European Sisters sent to a fellow Scalpel Valentine :
‘I witness another sigil ritual for the Sister I was telling you about last week. I think she is feeding her imp so much vital jism that it makes me concern. I worry she might be possesed by it. There is always such danger when dealing with helper’s and shadow people. I prefer to practise dreaming navigations rather than to toy with things from other worlds. These things come to you as your sweetest friend and then turn you to the food-finder, like cats. I don’t know maybe if I should talk to the Scalpel Superior about it. Maybe I’m just being paranoia, you know how much gossip there is in the House. I’m just a bit concern that she might be demon sleeper. What you think?’
Paranoia is like an infectious disease. And the message made me nervous for a number of reasons. Superficially, I couldn’t have any rumours circulating about me at the House. If anyone found out about my Candy Glass routine, I would be subjected to all manner of occultish punishments which would no doubt result in some form of horrific exile or termination. Secondly, I had to admit that she had a point. Before Etienne came along I was balanced in my witchiness. But Candy had thrown a real Stegosaurus bone in the soup. Was I really being manipulated by Tiffany? Was Candy really Tiffany running wild, acting through my weakness for Etienne, compelling me to acts of wanton degradation? Knowing Daemon’s, I could only assume that this probably was the case. The only problem was that I was loving every minute of it. I had stockpiled a nebula of vital energy and was luxuriating in secret meltdown. I had become a delicious liability, a hidden cancer, a Wicked Witch of the West! I decided to threaten the letter writer, whose name was Nadia.
I found Nadia in the sprawling gardens behind the House of Scalpel Valentine’s. It was near evening and she was gathering herbs in the nursery behind the poplar grove. It was a habit of hers to gather herbs at this time each day for the evening broth she drank. I slipped off my shoes and walked barefoot through the trees. I was ‘walking cat’ and she didn’t notice me at all until I was right behind her. She got a shock and dropped her sheaves of greenery. ‘Cat walking’ always gives one a magical advantage when stalking prey (I highly recommend it).
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“It’s fine,” she mumbled, kneeling to gather the delicate, fallen fronds. She was wearing a long black cape which pooled around her as she stooped. I squatted, in a feline fashion, and helped her to gather them up.
“So you think I’m a demon?” I asked casually.
She froze in the gloaming light, blinking at me in stuttering succesions. It was growing darker in the gardens, a thin mist forming in the shadowy masses of foliage. A bird called from somewhere in the Heath and I could feel time slow as our awarenesses altered into a vaguely predatorial gear. It was the state of two animals who sight each other in a wood, unsure who will attack first.
“Are you reading my mind?” she asked quietly.
She had a musky, Slovak accent which somehow lent a murderous gravity to her question.
“No,” I smiled. “I just hacked your mail.”
“Why you do that?”
“I heard you were starting rumours about me, I just wanted to make sure.”
We stared at each other as the light got dimmer, glazing the contours of our faces and eyelashes in a smouldering amber.
“I’m not sure about you,” she said frankly. “Maybe I go tell Scalpel Superior what I think.”
“Well, what can I do to convince you of my innocence,” I smiled breezily.
She snorted, a little like a horse. My element of surprise was wearing off, but she still had not noticed the little bundle of stalks which I had slipped into her fallen items.
“Maybe not to hack into my message box,” she muttered.
“You don’t work with familiars darling,” I replied. “Whereas I do, and furthermore, I’m perfectly in control of mine.”
We both stood slowly in the shadowy light.
“I’ll walk you back,” I said.
We strolled through the grove of poplars and I absent-mindedly plucked a small green apple from a familiar tree. After a moment’s hesitation I picked another and offered it to her. She hesitated for a moment, eyeing me in the chilly gloom.
“I can’t stand gossip,” I said wearily.
She nodded and took the apple which I held out to her. We munched our way across the long lawns. At the top of the slope, the House of Scalpel Valentine’s stood like a Roman ruin pierced by glowing, church-like windows.
“Maybe I am being, how you explain; paranoid,” she mumbled, chewing thoughtfully. “I have not left House for three months and jump at shadows.”
“Cabin fever is a terrible enemy,” I reciprocated, slinking over the cropped turf.
Her apple was down to the core now and we were in near darkness. Her face was a grey smudge of confusion when she found a length of cotton unravelling from the core and in between her teeth. She stopped abruptly, swiping at the strand which was jammed between her molars and incisors. I was giggling now. She swore under her breath, her cloak swishing to and fro like the wings of a trapped raven.
“Let me illuminate you little Sister,” I smiled, flicking open my slim gold lighter. The buttery flame caught on the sallow ovals of our faces, casting us against the night like forms in an old oil painting. There was crimson smudged all over her mouth and fingers. She gazed down at the blood soaked core of the apple in terror, fingering the black and red cotton threads which sewed up the interior of the fruit.
“Demon!” She choked, unable to bring her voice above a whisper.
She was clearly unaware of my careful timing and studious observation of her daily routines.
“You know what that blood is don’t you little Sister,” I whispered, flicking us back into blackness and squatting down to where she had sunk to her knees.
She was scuffling at her face, trying desperately to untangle the bloodied cotton from her teeth.
“It’s my Menstruum,” I smiled, stroking her scalp.
She coughed and spluttered under my fingers, like a troubled pet.
“I have bound you Nadia,” I whispered viciously into her ear. “And you shall comply with my will.”
She whimpered beneath me, sinking against the grass, seeming to have lost all inner firmamnent. I could feel the breeze sifting through the trees, as it had done around noon when I had climbed into the apple tree to inject my menstrual fluid into the fruit of my choice before binding my will into it with needle and thread (oldest trick in the book really). I stroked her hair heavily, as though she were a sick dog, reaching under her cloak to clutch her sex like a ripe fruit. She flinched, but did not resist. I held her like that while I spoke.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered soothingly. “I’m not a demon, though I can’t have you tarnishing my good standing now can I?”
She quivered in assent, head on knees against the grass, while I coiled warmly up against her from behind. Trees bristled darkly overhead as a car passed in the road beyond the ageing stone wall.
“I will call on you if I have need,” I smiled, kissing her back lightly whilst squeezing my false nails into her tenderest of flesh. A strangled sob escaped her, diffusing into the damp grass. Ants scurried across the pale of my arm, made vivid by the darkness.
“Meanwhile…” I added. “You keep nice and quiet about my private life, understand?”
She nodded furiously and I released her, wafting soundlessly back through the trees up to the house. In my pocket was a slim loop of black and red cotton, twined. All I had to do was slip it on to affect her. I left, fully aware of her movements. She would cry for awhile, out there on the dark grass. Then she would pull herself up and rush back to wash the blood from her mouth and hands. She would make her nightly healing broth and, in her nervous state, overlook the bundle of herbs which I had mixed in with hers. The herbs would cause her to sleep and their fragrance would create an atmosphere which would lead her to specific dreams. Much as the sound of an alarm clock is incorporated into a waking dream. She would drift unmoored into this place I had prepared, unaware that Tiffany would be waiting, poised like an enormous, glassy spider, waiting to encapsulate her in a specially constructed cocoon.
Dark sides are a little like old black nail polish. The bottle should have run dry ages ago; but there always seems to be enough to cover all your fingernails…One last time.
