Kathe Koja - The Cipher

“Come on, admit it,” she said. “You want to know too.”

“Yeah, just like I want to know how I’ll look when I’m dead, but I’m not in a hurry for that either. For God’s sake, Nakota! What’s next, a baby?”

“A shitty little pet-store rat is hardly a human being,” but there was something there I didn’t like at all, maybe the too obvious disgust at my words, the shifty overplay. Maybe she knew it too, heard a greed even she didn’t want to know she had. Whatever, she turned away, profile hidden by the clean swing of her hair, and an illogic memory came to me: she in my arms in some ice-cold bedroom, red print sleeping bag pulled half around us, me near sleep and chewing with my lips a piece of her hair as it lay across my face. I put my hand up, hiding or warding, I didn’t want to see her just then. When I looked up she was looking right at me.

“You don’t have to go with me,” she said.

Do you even have to ask?

Crouching beside her, hating my own excitement, her fingers blunt and steady as she knotted a handmade fishing-line harness around the mouse’s chest and back, and I said something, nervous stupid whisper about nice job and she looked at me, very seriously, and said, “I always think things through.” The mouse, nose going a mile a minute, squirming in a terror that reached crescendo as Nakota’s firm dangle brought it over the maw of the Funhole: to the mouse it must have looked like Armageddon, deeper than death, and its back arched in a spasm so fierce that I thought the harness would snap and the mouse fall to an unexplored death, but Nakota’s work was good and the fishing line held.

“Now,” she said.

I looked, then, not at the mouse descending, but at her, so close to the edge, the slow un-tremored movement of her hand, the calm track of her eyes as she watched the process she had started move relentlessly to fruition, but there was a cool frustration there too, unsatisfied, and would be until she made that trek herself; not as long as I’m alive. As the mouse went deeper I snatched a glance, its whiteness a living shock against the Funhole, its claws seeking purchase on what could not be climbed, and I thought, Something bad will happen now, worse than the bugs.

But nothing did. The mouse went deeper still, deep until we could barely see its color, and Nakota said, without turning her head, “Maybe you were—”

and a blast of fur and fluid hit her right in the face, she cried out, made as if to scrape crookedly at her fouled eyes and I saw her knee move, heedless, horrifyingly close and I grabbed her and hauled her sideways as a puff of sweet air came out of the Funhole, heaven’s air might smell so good. Shaking, so hard I could barely sit up, but my grip on Nakota was strong enough to hurt.

“Ow,” she said, and I let her go, to wipe two-handed at herself, T-shirt up like a towel, and I stared at her breasts as if I had never seen them before. The T-shirt came away gummy. She reached fingers like feelers into her hair, gave her head a gentle shake which dislodged something, some piece, and “Fucking A,” she said, and incredibly she laughed, holding up a tail, part of a tail, that had turned to bright primary mosaic and was firm as a rock; she waved it to demonstrate, shook her head again and found a foot. The toes had split and splayed, the claws gone bigger than the foot itself, enormously distended and humped and hideous and she laughed again, really delighted, and I saw a shred of something slick and red stuck to the side of her mouth, etched laugh line of horrible mirth, and I scrambled past her, pushing her nearly as hard as I had held her, out out out of my way.

When she at last emerged I was sitting on the landing, as far away from the door as I could get without actually deserting her. Nothing could have forced me back, maybe not even a scream, her scream, who knows. Anyway, anything that would make Nakota scream would probably scare me into catatonia. I still felt sick, all over.

“Get what you came for?” I asked her as she stopped before me, not clean but cleansed. This kind of adventure was not only her climate, it was maybe the only climate in which she was meant to live. She had her little specimen, or what fragments she had been able to collect, clutched loosely in her right hand; with her left she reached to raise me up. She looked like she could do it, too, strength without effort, toothpick arms infused like Atlas.

“I want to wash up,” she said. “This shirt is fucked too.”

The water ran a long time. I sat on the couch-bed, drinking beer, my glance a nervous walk from her mouse pieces and back, there and back, wanting not to want to touch them. They were so incredibly weird, though. You almost had to touch them, if only to assure yourself that they were really there. Hard rock tail, its shimmer under my dim-bulb lamps, the monstrous foot, and part, maybe, of a head, what had once been a head. Lying there on the fake wood of the coffee table, artifacts of a place whose climate and architecture were enough to warp the fabric of the visitor, tourist or not, go on, idiot, pick up the damned head already! So I did.

Squeamish, but then the sheer steamroller exhilaration of the bizarre came over me; I felt as I had when I, we, first discovered the Funhole: my God, this is so strange, . Gently I fingered the strained skull, its half-flayed muzzle,- the eye socket now elongated upward, shaped to a sloping triangle, stretched like old rubber and like old rubber crumbling too, its limits delicate, frost pictures drawn by the terrible dark.

Nakota, humid shower smell and murmuring over my shoulder: “It’s so beautiful, Nicholas, isn’t it,” her last words not inviting agreement but laying down a challenge, and for once I rose to it, reached behind to fondle her hip as I fondled the head, feeling both to be equally strange, equally desirable. Her wet hair dribbling down, fluid on her almost skeletal collarbones, one drop above her breast a slow prismed tremble of light as some freakish angle caught it, jeweled it as I half turned to rise, put my tongue on that wayward drop, imagining as I did that it was the source of the scent given off tonight by the Funhole, black nectar and I bit at her nipple, the half head still safe in my thoughtful grasp. Now her murmur was approval, I was pleasing her at last, pulling her with one hand, nipple still between my teeth and I bit harder, releasing only to lay her down and kneel between her damp and narrow thighs. To guide myself inside I set down the head, and consumed by her wetness I forgot it, or rather disremembered for my thoughts then were unlike the fleshy dreams that usually partnered sex: instead they were explicit, sharp and detailed as the best hallucinations: myself fucking the Funhole, thrusting with all my might, its subtle pull become a vacuum so stark and demanding that I felt, myself coming, far more quickly than I wanted, for either me or Nakota. Looking down I saw her, eyes closed, mouth working, the gruesome little half head pressed and lolling at her nipple, and in that sight was my orgasm, stretched and distorted like the head itself.

Slow panting sighs as I lay down, the sweat on my chest cooling as I pressed against her. Eyes still shut, a graven smile beginning as she raised the head, aiming that twisted muzzle not at her lips but mine.

“Kiss me,” she said.

And I did.

The next morning my lips still held that bitter kiss; I could not, did not want to believe that I had actually touched the misshapen mouse mouth with my own. Scrubbing the skin from my mouth with the flattened bristles of my toothbrush, rubbing and rubbing till I had a clown’s smile of abrasion, thinking of the mouse head at Nakota’s tiny nipple, strange nursling; she would never wake disgusted at what she’d done the night before.