Darkheart

The Present: Peaches & Cream

The room smelled, though it didn't smell particularly bad. It reeked of incense and candles and unguents, of a hundred earthy, musky, spicy elements, of cardamom and ginger and cinnamon and cloves, patchouli and white sage, juniper and sandalwood and ylang ylang, and those were merely the scents Cris could still pick out of the crowd. She'd dumped and lit and sprayed all of it--everything she could find, and now she lay on the floor, surrounded by her minerals and rocks and crystals. The massage table hadn't felt right when she'd settled down onto it, so she'd shoved it against the wall and stretched out on the floor, but that hadn't felt right, either. Everything needed to be closer, touching her, if possible, because something in her desired to be near it, to have it close to her. So she'd swept off the shelves and counters, she'd moved some things carelessly but others with gentle caution, until she'd built up a veritable pile of all her glittery, faceted, earth-birthed treasures. Then she'd carved out a space in the midst of them, stripped down to her underwear, and curled up into her dragon's hoard. She'd used her hands to pull the rocks and gems closer, right up to her bare skin, almost as if she were attempting to bury herself in sand on a beach. The bigger ones fell off their pedestals, and a number of the more fragile surely crumbled in the fray; she didn't want to think about what would happen when she tried to stand, because in that moment, nothing felt more right to Cris than bringing those glassy, opalescent, shimmering bits and pieces into as close of contact with her as possible.

She'd lost her, hadn't she? Lost that girl she'd finally caught. Gone inside to get her shotgun, and when she'd gotten back outside, the monster had disappeared. Jess hadn't seen the devil, but Cris wasn't surprised. The girl was her phantom, not Jess's; her sister was no part of this, thank goodness. Funny thing was, Cris knew trying to get rid of the girl was a losing game. The thing had been haunting her for days, now--weeks!--just as she'd haunted her years ago. So Cris instinctively knew that in order to get rid of her this time, she'd probably be expected to go down, again--down, down, down . . . where the thing with its horrible appetites moved, and the black hung thick and heavy as a pall. Oh, of course it was all heading there. They all knew it. They'd all known it this entire decade and a half.

There was no escaping it.

Cris opened her eyes, which had been closed, and spotted a minty fluorite within her gaze. She took hold of it, brought the mineral to her shoulder, and pressed it against her bare skin, rolling it down her collarbone and in between her breasts. Spying a nearby black pillar of tourmaline as large as her middle finger and wrapped in white albite, Cris dropped the fluorite and reached for the other. Closing her eyes, she touched the perfect geometric column to her lips, then opened her mouth and ran its top and sides along her tongue, even nibbling a bit. She did as much for several other minerals, allowing for and reveling in their diverse shapes, some strange growths of spikes, others thin layered sheets, some rough with bits like peas in frozen stew, others smooth as glass. She tasted them, slid them across her bareness, even ingested some of the smallest pieces, and where her mind was during this process, she hardly knew. The only place she wouldn't quite touch was her lower abdomen. Some slight discomfort had begun to grow there, inside of her, since she'd seen that man outside Real Value Hardware, since he'd punched his hand up into her, felt her insides as familiarly as if he'd done it before.

In spite of no actual evidence that his physical assault had actually occurred--no marks on her stomach, no blood, no witnesses, and even no him--Cris knew it'd been real, as real as when she'd seen him in Biggie's and outside Mom & Pop's, as real as the devil girl was, as real as everything below the crust of the world was. It was a different sort of real, wasn't it? One that neither she nor the others nor likely anyone could comprehend, for full understanding would surely destroy them in some incomprehensible way, in some manner beyond their own physical and psychological suffering, something truly arcane and acroamatic. That scared her more than anything else--the potential for torment beyond her frame of reference.