The Lost Goddess

39

Death was near. Jake could sense his presence in the grimy room, Death the Bureaucrat with his infinite checklist, ticking the boxes, auditing names, eyes unsmiling behind his rimless spectacles as he went down his list. Baby smashed. Tick. Sister killed. Tick. Mother dead. Tick.

He could hear the gurgling noises of his own blood, the last of his blood, filling the glass bottles.

Yet even as he heard this he was staring at his mother. His dead sister and his dead mother floating under the Butcher’s Lake. Their white arms waving, beckoning him down, and down. He yearned to join them, at last, in the nothingness; to commingle his ashes with their ashes, to meld his nonexistence with theirs, to sing the song, to be standing in church as a small boy once again, still loved, still mothered, still holding his mother’s hand as she stared at the stained-glass window, gazing up in adoration: at the robes of blue, Saint Lucy blue, the blue of the Virgin.

The beloved mother. The forgiving mother. Who left him, who left him alone in this life. Until the only thing he could do was run away, so he had fled to the very ends of the earth — and yet here he had found her again, the mother he hated, he loved, he hated, and his sister, frail and floating, two floating female heads, disembodied, kinarees with wings on the sandstone of Angkor.

The blood siphoned and guttered, the last fluid ounces were draining into the bottles: like pilfered gasoline on the streets of Phnom Penh, on the road to Skuon, where the spider witch had cursed him.

The krasue sucked. She was inside him. The demon. Sucking out his blood. Like Chemda sucking him in bed with her seven black tongues.

He rasped. Choked. Shuddered. The last blood was nearly taken. He was inside. He was outside. He was blind now. He couldn’t see. His sight had gone. But he could hear voices. Was he hallucinating? One of the voices was Tyrone.

Tyrone? He realized he was purely dreaming now.

He blacked out.