The Ammonite Violin & Others Read Online Free

there’s no hope of ever getting back to the surface again.
    “You could have joined her,” the woman says, the thing that might have been a woman—as they say—once upon a time. Back before that book of yours was printed. Before this deep place opened up like the whole wide world asking for a fucking kiss and someone hid the wound so you’d need a book to ever find it. “It would have been easier that way, easier for the both of you.”
    A coward dies a thousand times before his death ...
    I try to stand, because I want to see what they’ve made of you. I want to see what’s left. What you’re becoming, but my legs are so weak, and my head spins, and I sit right back down again. She watches while I draw a circle in the dust, as perfect a circle as I can manage with my fingers on the gritty, ancient cement floor, trying to remember all the things you ever taught me about casting circles, north, south, the four fucking quarters, and she laughs at me again.
    “Your head is filled with music,” she says. She sounds delighted.
    “There’s always a siren,” I tell her, spitting the words like pebbles, “singing you to shipwreck.” And I’m wishing there were magic in the words, magic like the mess they’ve made of you. Alchemy. Transformation. Something that changes one thing into something else entirely.
    We were halfway to the bottom before it occurred to me to start counting the steps.
    You sat up straight, some trick you’d learned, and those secret muscles inside you tightened around me until I gasped and clenched my teeth. Your breasts smeared with my blood, my blood trickling thick down your chin, dripping onto my belly. You licked your lips clean and grinned. “I could tear it off,” you say. “I could always find another play pretty. Someone who isn’t such a goddamn pussy.”
    Inside my circle, mock safe inside my circle, and all the sea pressing down on me. There are things that are born into darkness and live their entire lives in darkness, in deep places, and they’ve learned to make whatever light they need. It sprouts from them, lanterns of flesh to dot the abyss like yellow-green stars. Stars like bare bulbs strung on electrical cords, and I wish that I could make my own light here at the bottom of the vaults of the earth.
    “I see a stairway,” the demon thing says to me, “so I follow it down into the belly of a whale.”
    “They’re only songs,” I tell her again.
    “I built the shadows here,” it says, as though it understands. “I built the growl in the voice I fear...”
    “Did you?” I ask. “Did you really?” and then she laughs that laugh that reminds me just how much darker dark can be, if it has a mind to stop fooling around and be done with me once and for fucking all.
    “I could always find someone else,” you said, in case I hadn’t heard you the first time. And then you shut up and make another hole in me.
    She kissed you, the way you’d always asked me to kiss you. She kissed you, and your eyes rolled back. Your lips moved, but the noises from the ceiling, the excited rustle of wings and the cluck clack clack of all those claws against concrete and the suckling sounds, all of that to mask whatever you were saying to her or to me or to whatever ravenous gods a stone cold bitch like you deigns to get down on her knees for.
    She folded you, and I could never even have dreamt such a geometry, such a fine and terrible origami of flesh and bone and blood. A paper flower budding from nothing at all but the flatness of you. A butterfly. A scorpion of planes and angles and nightmares, and before she was finished, you’d begun to sweat the way she sweats. She’d gone deeper into you than I could ever have gone, a hundred times deeper, a thousand thousand times deeper, down stairs I had never even glimpsed. You sweated milk-white droplets that pooled at your bare feet, your whole body bleeding itself dry of your soul, of the humanity you’d spent your life hating and