Fiction: A Little Harlequin

By Maria Barnes

 

 

Sleep, little harlequin, and dream about the millennia-old house clothed in darkness and about the room in this house, occupied by your nocturnal miseries. Dream about two faces you cannot forget: their features are printed on every mirror you encounter in your modest abode. They are getting closer and closer, coming into focus, ready to extricate you from your warm-blooded oblivion. Dream then about pain and luscious agonies to which these faces will unwittingly subject you.

When everything is done, dream about emptiness, my little harlequin.

 

***

 

I couldn’t think of anything but sleep as I plunged into that reddish chasm on the edge of consciousness. My eyelids began to droop. Beyond them, beyond the bed where I lay half asleep, were two hands with long fingernails marked with mold and infected brown scars. They groped around for my face, and when they found it, they shoved themselves into my mouth to stifle whatever scream I had on the tip of my tongue. The sharp nails bit into my flesh like fishing hooks and scratched and scraped for what felt like hours. At last darkness had thickened in the street, and the soft tissues in my throat ruptured, staining the soiled sheets with my pungent blood.

While I was struggling to breathe, drowning in the viscous liquid, the hands were getting ready for the miracle of unbirth. They put on a pair of gloves made from the sickly green light of streetlamps. The lucent material was stretched over the fingers, resembling hazy rivers of stars amid pure blackness. From that blackness, the hands extracted various instruments whose glossy surfaces briefly reflected a face. A maddening smile was painted across the thin lips, and I was screaming, screaming myself awake, but the state of wakefulness turned out to be yet another nightmare.

“If I had known that you felt like this,” she said, pointing a rusty bullet extractor at my chest, “I would have disposed of you quicker.”

“When?” I asked, but did I really want to hear her answer?

“Long ago, when you were a tiny cluster of cells,” she said, “a delicate cluster of cells, loved by no one, not even by me. Or before that, before there was any human-shaped void in the universe.”

She fell silent and dropped the extractor. It hit the floor with a deafening sound, causing me to recoil in shock.

“What is the opposite of pain?” she asked after some time.

“Pleasure.”

“Not in your case,” she said, cackling.

The smell of rot surrounded us as soon as she drew her briefcase closer to my bed. I marked an assortment of knives and surgical masks, a translucent plastic bag full of nails and screws. On the bottom of the case, a blunt looking saw reposed, vibrating in anticipation of the feast.

“Absence,” she mumbled and caressed the saw handle with her thumb.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“The opposite of pain is absence,” she said and came over to my bed, her angular body agile and pliant.

She bent over me, and the reek of unclean dentures brushed against my clammy skin. When she placed her hands on my chest, I felt the touch of metal on my skin. It was not a scalpel. I knew that much. I glanced down at her hands. They held a filthy butter knife, like the one I used to ignore during the meals in my natal home.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

“Unbirth you.”

I remembered how once, when I was six or seven, she bought me a porcelain doll, a frail plaything in a dusty blue dress and a wide-brim straw hat. On the very first evening, it slipped out of my hands while I was showing our house to its new inhabitant. The doll’s face shattered, suffering, before its gruesome death, a phantasmagoria of hideous contortions. Only the stuffed torso remained undamaged, a remnant of its ephemeral existence. She told me I could never have another doll. I wailed with grief and regret, and promised to be careful the next time. She assented to my pleas and purchased a new doll, a facsimile of its predecessor. I adamantly refused to play with it, and it sat safely tucked away in a corner of my room.

“I know what you’re thinking about,” I lied, picturing the doll and wondering what had happened to it.

“You don’t,” she said. “Anyway, it won’t hurt, no more than some things.”

“Such as?”

“Drinking the tea I made for you. It nearly rendered you unconscious, so you almost missed the miracle. I need you to be awake for the miracle to work.”

She laughed, her mouth a crimson wound, but despite the jovial sound, her fear splashed in the throat like a fountain of gore, threatening to spill out of the cavity. If only I could reach and extricate that fear from her body! But it had fused with her bones at her birth as it had done with mine, and there was no escaping it unless one resorted to unbirth.

“First, I’ll saw off your arms,” she said.

“Whatever.”

She looked hurt, but by then I had grown tired of the whole affair and wanted for the miracle to end or at least to begin, if that was an appropriate term in the circumstances. I transformed the world of shadows into sleek nothingness by closing my eyes, and I clenched my teeth and waited, but the pain did not come. There was a giggle, a rustle of fabric shoes, and a harlequin alongside some tenuous daylight invaded my field of vision. The harlequin was smiling at me. Or perhaps he was not, and I saw his fantastical double studying me with a sly grin.

“I know you, don’t I,” I said.

The harlequin shrugged by way of reply and waved, as if he was saying goodbye to someone far away. Having finished waving, he asked in a low voice if I wanted another cup of tea. The question wrenched me out of my somnolent state and thrust me into a state of despair. I scanned my resting body. All my limbs were unharmed and my throat was not sore, yet these facts did little to assuage my panic.

“I don’t,” I said.

Blurry sunlight filtered through the curtain and ambled around the room, settling on the harlequin’s face. Droplets of blood hung from his long lashes, absorbing the light and turning bright red. If he had blinked, the lashes would have grazed against his skin, and the droplets would have rolled down his cheeks like tears. His eyes stayed wide open, however—two tunnels of eternity where everything loses its shape, becomes formless and perishes in the immortal night.

He saw me watching and perched on the edge of my bed.

“Do you want to know what became of her?” he asked.

“The woman with the miracle?”

“The woman with the miracle,” he said, nodding.

I propped myself up on my elbows. The harlequin touched his throat with his index finger, which left a vermilion mark on his skin, like a warning sign. I leaned back on my bed, my palms sweaty, my pulse throbbing in my ears.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “my sister and I used to play this game where we tied each other up in the dark.”

“That doesn’t sound nice,” I said, and suddenly he was on top of me, his painted face affixed to mine with the warmth of our touching cheeks. He bared his teeth, and I saw vestiges of meat in the tiny cracks between them. Infused by rot, those pieces stank of corruption and pain.

“Do you want to know about the woman, then?” he asked, spitting the words in my face.

“No,” I said, trying to breathe through my mouth.

“I once cut out her tongue and left her there, in the dark,” the harlequin said, “tied up, silent.”

“The woman?”

The harlequin shook his head and laughed. It sounded as if he was laughing at the darkness where his sister still dwelled, and even though he was close, the noise was a distant echo of an echo of a thunderstorm. That was when I noticed that his face lacked the usual animation of a living creature, that it was a mask. He seemed to notice it, too, because he pulled at the mask, which effortlessly dropped to the floor. Another mask appeared under it, and another. As he was taking them off one by one, an infinite series of nightmares glimmered in the blackness behind the masks. Beyond those dreams, there was nothing, not even an approximation of a face or a bleared shape of a monster.

“It never ends,” I said.

“It does eventually,” the harlequin said. He was invisible now because I closed my eyes to protect myself from this last dream.

“Or maybe it doesn’t end. Words are not important. But the miracle of unbirth must be performed.”

“I see.”

“Would you like another cup of tea?” the harlequin whispered in my ear, and the pain I was waiting for burrowed into my flesh, dragging me to the very bottom of sorrow and suffering, beyond which lies only emptiness.

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Barnes teaches English and writes dark fiction. Her work has appeared in The Pinworm Factory: A Tribute to Eraserhead edited by Scott Dwyer, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Samjoko Magazine, among other places.