The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [49]
He knelt down, rapped at the old woman's bald head, lifted it up to test its weight, then turned it and used a finger to probe behind the eyeball.
Mother Lamprey's skull was empty.
He was woken the next morning by a stinging sensation in his arm. He undid the crude dressing he had strapped to the wound the night before and gazed dumbfounded at the curl of gristle that was a baby's ear, sprouting smoothly from the surface of his skin. Blood rushed through his head; he felt his face suffused with heat. This could spread. Cancer. Malformation. His whole arm taken up with a child's face, eyes, a ― a mouth.
Ashura reached the sink barely in time to save the polished floor from his vomit. It blossomed and quivered with identity and he had to beat it down the plughole with a flannel, then boil a kettle and chase it with the water through the crude copper pipe. Its screams were terrible.
He leaned up against the basin, shivering. The ear on his arm twitched.
Ashura staggered back to his bed and laid his head in his hands. "This isn't happening," he told himself, and wished he could believe his words.
It wasn't as if such things were unheard of. They were. They were easily dealt with, too. All you had to do was have it removed by a psycho-kine. Who was GodGate's psychokine? Trimghoul. Who stole Mother Lamprey's brain? Trimghoul. Who would know precisely what Ashura had been up to if he revealed the ear on his forearm?
Trimghoul.
Trimghoul the psychokine lived on the outskirts of the city, in an expensive villa tended by many burly servants. He was a recluse, and a hypochondriac. He rarely ventured abroad, and when he did so, he wore a beekeeper's hat with a long, black veil, long gloves of grey cotton and a sable topcoat with silver edging, which he never removed, no matter the fineness of the weather. Folk who had visited him spoke of elaborate and intimate searches of their belongings and their person prior to the audience, and of the unbearable closeness of his apartments, of windows nailed shut and waxed to keep out draughts, or glassless and screened by tight muslin cloths.
Ashura walked up the gravel drive, nodding soberly to the men whose task it was to pour gallon after gallon of expensive, bewitched insecticide onto the garden shrubs. Ashura shivered. Trimghoul's wealth had always disturbed him. Now it scared him, for he had begun to wonder whence that wealth had originated.
He stepped into the shade of an ornate iron-worked portico and reached for the heavy brass knocker, fashioned in the shape of a human jawbone.
A balding man with bright, blue eyes, lips too full for such a jowl-ridden jaw and hands that knew no manners, searched him, stripped him of his coat and outer shoes and trussed him up in a clean white apron. Trimghoul was in his study. There were no porters or butlers beyond the portico, and the house was never locked. It was a sign of Trimghoul's power. Who could harm a man who could control objects at a distance? It would take the brute force of a dozen or more to overcome him, if it came to it.
Ashura knocked on the door.
"Come." That cultured, masterful voice. No wonder Trimghoul, for all his eccentricity, was a favourite among the ladies of the region.
Ashura opened the door. Trimghoul's face was beautiful in the way that all frail-boned, high-cheeked men are beautiful ― delicate in feature but strong in poise. He wore a high collar and a sober black suit.
By contrast, his only other exposed flesh ― his hands and wrists -were covered in hair, gnarled and powerful-looking, and his gait was stooped and awkward, as if he found it much more comfortable to bend his knees the opposite way. Ashura had never seen Trimghoul en deshabille, but, from what he had heard, Trimghoul's face was the most human thing about him. The rest of him brought to mind the disturbing eroticism of satyrs.
True to report, a fire burned savagely behind an iron grate. The heat was barely tolerable. Ashura felt his forehead and cheeks prick with moisture.
"Ah, young 'prentice. More