LAYN PALMER — The Rot in Crystal Bay

"Deep inside my body is a temple, within which my void soul lies untouched...throughout the flesh, a legion of ailments gather, each of which would kill a normal man...A veritable Ark of plague..." The lookout sighted Crystal Bay, a town built around a crescent inlet, surrounded by towering limestone cliffs. The cliffs, sharp and serrated, shone in the distance like mirages, the walls of an otherworldly castle. It was only as one drew nearer that the glamour vanished, and the town revealed itself to be quite ordinary. The lookout’s call enlivened the men below. The crew had grown listless after months upon the sea's vast, glittering sameness. As they went about their work, each dreamt of the vices and pleasures found most often, not upon the sea or in some far flung jungle or desert, but in towns and cities, where common folk gathered, idle and secure. One of the ropes began to fray. One of the sailors, a new hire, as it happened, who'd come aboard as recently as the last port, volunteered to fetch it. A dark look came over his fellows. "Be wary of the knight down there." "The knight? He's down there?" "He is now. He was staying with the captain. And the two were as happy as a pair of crabs in a whore's bush. But the knight himself requested the change in quarters a day or two ago." The new sailor paused at the mouth of the ladder. All at once the sun and salt air seemed very dear to him. It was only with the goading of his companions that he at last went below on the errand for which he volunteered. Bilge sloshed about his ankles and a rat swam by, its spine visible above the water like the back of some fabled sea beast. Neither the rat nor the bilge gave him pause, for he meant to go about his work quickly. He sorted through the ropes in search of one an appropriate length. Then he noticed a figure in the corner of his eye. He had yet to show his face. Even alone, in the darkness of the hold, he wore his armor in its entirety, a suit of angular black plate. The helmet offered vision through five vertical slits and was topped by a sharp, elongated point, not unlike a rhino’s horn. “He could gore me with that,” the sailor thought. He tried to ignore the knight. He’d heard tales from others. When asked why he kept his armor on, the knight said, “I do not expose my skin.” Another asked the knight where he hailed from. His reply: “The same place as you.” These thoughts slowed the sailor. Noticing the man’s hesitation, the knight shifted in his seat atop a crate. "I've always been fond of rats," the knight said, his voice deep and stony, echoing first within his armor, then in the larger hollow of the hold. "A rat will survive where nobler creatures will not. Take this hold, for instance. There is some reptile in the water. I believe it is quite large, but I've only seen the spines. Still, the rats go about all the same. Fearless creatures." Seeing the expression on the sailor's face, the knight laughed. The sound was completely at odds with his baritone voice. It sounded more like a drunken sailor singing a shanty in poor falsetto than a proper laugh. The laughter ceased. The knight said, "Don't stay too long. I've been down here some time, breathing, and I'm afraid I've left my mark." The sailor did not respond. He hurried up the ladder with a length of rope. Later that evening, after dropping anchor, the sailor asked his fellow about this knight, who could be seen making his way across the docks with nothing but his armaments. “Aye, I spoke to him. He calls himself the Knight of Rot. I went down to offer him a drink, as a sign of good will. I’d intended to share, but he emptied my flask in a single gulp. Then I sat there all night listening to him 'til my balls shriveled. It’s his voice that does it. He sounds so far away in there. And you wouldn’t know it to look, but he’s a thinker as well as a killer. A strange web he’s made of the world. He claims that everything on earth--you, me, the creatures of the water and the land, hell, the water and the land--all of it, is nothing but infection blackening God's humors. To him, Creation was nothing but a leeching. A blood letting." "A sick thought. I wish you'd kept it to yourself. Such things spread and, by and by, one man's foolishness becomes another's. For me, the earth was made in seven days and not a drop of blood was spilled in the process, and that's the end of it." "Aye, but what about the eighth day, or the ninth, or yesterday, for that matter." "Listen to yourself. You should have left him be." Both men looked across the dock, but the Knight of Rot was gone. During their leave, many from that crew encountered the knight again. They saw the gleam of his armor in some alley or heard the screams of a woman as he escaped out her window. The knight was on the tongue of everyone in Crystal Bay, and it was well known where he came from. That crew had carried halfway across the world a pederast and a rapist, a blasphemer and idolater, a common brigand, a murderer. The crew attracted hostile glares in the bars, were denied outright at brothels. Slowly they returned to their bunks below decks, days before raising anchor. In the dark, the new sailor said, "I would have never thought it possible. He was so peaceful during the voyage." "Maybe he needed us to sail the ship," his fellow replied. A third said the knight had no need of anything. That he had sailed with them because he was bored. # She floated on her back at the bay's northern horn. Seaweed covered her face. Her shoulder brushed the base of the white cliffs as the water ebbed and flowed. One hand by chance covered her sex, the other reached up and outward toward the rocks. All over the body were oddly colored scabs. Bright cobalt, blood orange, saturnine yellow. Metallic in their luster, the scabs were also hard in texture. You could scrape a knife against one as if against stone. This hardness seeped under the outer layer of skin. A physician was summoned to view the girl after a group of dock hands withdrew her from the water. The physician tried to remove the scabs for further examination, but he could not cut through or around them. He moved her hand aside. The oxidation had spread to her genitals, which were hardened inside and out and colored iridescent green to match a dragonfly's carapace. As the days wore on, more bodies, their symptoms stranger still: boiled veins and putrid odors beyond that of normal decay, rashes reaching from head to toe and flesh around the fingers as hard as the nails. The magistrate set a curfew and put the guard on high alert. Merchant ships came to the port and found no one available to unload their wares. Their captains went to the bars--which, despite all danger, were still open and moderately full--and they heard the stories of the knight in black armor who never showed his skin, and they went elsewhere. Slowly, the town lost all vitality. The only ones seen in the streets were those world weary or cocksure enough not to know fear. Aside from the bars, there was one other place where life continued as it always had. Atop the white cliffs, overlooking the town, was a convent. On one side was its chapel, with a bell tower facing the water. Opposite that was the road into town. Slightly above the clifftop was a flat plateau where pines grew, giving the white-walled convent a dark green halo. The inhabitants were dedicated to contemplation and charity. Their only interaction with the town below was to deliver a portion of their garden's yield to the poor and to teach children scripture and basic math. The only change here was that the gate was closed, and the sisters prayed more fervently. Yet, amid this isolation and security, the desire which drove the knight also dwelt. One of the nuns there spent her afternoons on a stone bench in the garden. It was conveniently positioned at a corner joining two paths--if anyone walked her way, she would see them coming in advance. And this was not her only safety: the book, which contained illicit, apocryphal images, was disguised as a bible. She twisted her habit into a hard knot between her thighs and held it close, rubbing against it, pleasuring herself in the open air, even as her sisters walked by, and none of them the wiser. That day she spent her time with an image of Lilith, a woman with pale porcelain skin and hair the color of flame licking the Devil's anus. When she tired of this, she turned the page. Here, Lot's eldest rode his drink-addled member while the younger girl watched, a gentle hand on her sister's hip. She lingered here on this scene and passed much of the day. It was only when a shadow crossed the buttock of Lot's elder daughter that she realized her time was short. She turned to a last fantasy: the severed head of Saint Matthias held tightly between the Whore of Babylon's thighs, the woman arched in ecstasy while her many-headed mount lay curled beneath her. The bell rang. It was time to pray, time to eat. The nun pricked her thumb on a nearby rose thorn, hoping the pain would calm her quickly, but the sensation only excited her further. For her the body, even when it was in pain, was only a source of pleasure. More than any of her sisters, she counted life a blessing. She walked through the garden, pausing to find calm in the passing scent of lavender. Then something else came to her on the wind. It was as if her private fantasies had taken life and now rode the breeze. In this smell was the spiced wine that drugged Lot, the sweat dripping through the Devil's excited crevice, and the droppings of the Whore's chimera. The nun turned and looked up at the pine forest above the convent, but there was nothing to see. In the chapel, her prayers were unusually fervent, and the company of the other nuns, usually nothing more than a distraction, was a great comfort to her. For several days she went about in fear. She did not visit the garden or read her illicit book. At night she did not sleep. She rolled in her bed and thought of taking the witch's place and tasting the Devil's sweet decay, of becoming the eldest daughter staring down into her father's eyes, of seeing the view between the whore's legs. When morning came, the sun found her in a heavy sweat, her hands coated in her own nectar. Unknown to her, her thoughts, her pleasures, her scent, were a beacon to the knight. He was a great climber, and he had made his camp in a cave high up on the sheer cliff wall, just below the convent and the pine forest. He survived on lichen and a species of snail that lived in the shallow pool from which he drank. In the early morning he scaled the cliffs, a black planet transiting a shining white sun, and from there he watched the convent. He memorized the sisters' schedules and noted the changing of the town guard. He ate the eggs of songbirds. He satisfied himself with a wild hog that crossed his path, slitting its throat when its squealing grew too loud and at last flinging the mutilated body toward the sea, the brown and ragged form breaking into a haze of blood and bone and fur as it crashed against the cliffs. # The knight climmbed over the convent wall, his armor shining in the moonlight like polished obsidian. He found himself on the garden trail, at the very spot where the nun he desired spent her days with her book. Around him were the fronds of large ferns and vines climbing their trellis and the low thin branches of fig trees. The sight gave him pause. He remembered another garden, another moonlit night. It was the private pleasure garden of a baroness, laden with ripe fruits and flowers in full bloom. She had heard tales of his valor and seen his portrait, an armored profile, and invited him there. He sensed in her a new symptom, something for his collection, something that could churn inside him and emerge once more dark and virginal, inflicting itself on the world. This newness was what he prized most of all, as it was the inner nature of his partner that determined the outcome of the mixture. He forced her to kneel and rotated open the port hole in the groin of his armor. A terrible stench came forth, unnameable for its own multiplicity, a stench to encompass all stench, but the baroness did not recoil. Rather she shuddered in anticipation, as if something were wrong with her nose and she sensed something other than that which was before her. The knight withdrew his member, itself no earthly thing. It was as large as a horse's, barbed like a waterfowl's, and colored as if the Devil himself had painted it, the top half a burning red, the bottom a deep black. She pleasured him willingly, with every technique in an impressive repertoire, and when his climax came a terrible change occurred in her. Her teeth fused together and extended into the gums. The inside of her mouth became two solid enamel walls. She looked up at him, baring her two enormous teeth, a living death's head. She asked the knight what he had done to her. "I have uncovered you. Now you will work my purpose, which was your own all along. You will go to your husband, pleasure him as you have me, and he will spread the affliction further and further. Many will suffer from our creation." The woman began to shriek, waking the castle's servants and guards. A young boy, a gardener, smitten with his mistress and in fact favored by her from time to time, had watched from behind a blackberry bush. He attempted to intervene, and the Knight of Rot slew the child with a single stroke, slitting him from groin to collar with his longsword. In the convent garden the knight smiled at the memory, though his joy was invisible beneath the helmet. He moved deeper into the convent, walking with certainty and entitlement as if he had lived there his whole life. He entered the convent proper through a side door and climbed the stairs to the second level, where the dormitories were. The moonlight in that upper hall, entering through a series of narrow windows, created stripes of shadow and cool blue daggers across the stone floor. The knight did not attempt to quiet his steps. It mattered not if he was seen now. Indeed, one of the sisters--not the one he desired, just another member of the flock--woke due to an overfull bladder. She saw the knight. He left her no time to cry out, quickly stabbing her and stowing the body in an alcove, propping her up as if she had fallen asleep standing. The woman he had come for was yet awake, in a cell at the end of the hall, twisting her sheets about herself, her body wracked with silent screams. When she saw him in the doorway, she lay still. She was on her back, propped up on her elbows, facing the door. Her skirt hung wide about her knees like the mouth of a church bell. The cold whites of her eyes shone in the dark. She saw him clearly for what he was: the embodiment of her hidden self. When he came to her she resisted because she knew he would want it so. He cut open her habit, struck her boyish breasts, gripped her tightly around her bony ribcage, and penetrated her vibrant ringing body. Halfway through their intercourse, the sister who shared that room woke. The knight and his nun killed her together, the nun holding back the sister's arms while the knight strangled her with a bedsheet. The two finished their liaison atop the cooling body. As the knight led her from that place, down the hall, where the first sister's blood pooled, and through the moonlit garden. At the convent wall, he hoisted her onto his back. The nun wrapped her arms about the metal neck, and the knight began to climb with the same speed as before. It was only as they ascended the cliffs that her vision began to fade. The nun looked over her shoulder with her arms wrapped tight around the climbing knight. Her home of seven years was nothing but a vague outline. # She woke and saw nothing. A strange scent hung about her: the knight's own odor clung to her skin, a scent akin to white mold and insects marching on wet bark, all mixed with the surrounding overtones of pine. Her knees and wrists and breasts were reddened, her buttocks striped purple from merciless beating. In the woods, he'd taken her again and again, not stopping when she collapsed from exhaustion, only when he'd had his fill. She touched her eyelids. They were tightly closed, as if by a vice. No matter how she strained, they would not open. She would have clawed them apart except for fear of inflicting even worse and lasting damage. Over her eyes, circling the sockets, spanning the bridge of her nose, rising halfway up her brow, was a heavy brown coating marked with craters and mounds and spiderweb fractures--in touching her face, she touched the surface of an alien planet, the drought stricken fields of Mars. She sniffed the air, located the knight. She sat up and faced him and asked him what he'd done. "Ask what we have done. A union. The fruits of which you feel upon your face." She did not understand. She knew of no such union, no such fruits. The knight clarified: "Deep inside my body is a temple, within which my void soul lies untouched. Rife throughout the flesh, a legion of ailments gather, each of which would kill a normal man. Despite this evil in me, a veritable Ark of plague, my collection is incomplete. So I travel in search of partners, each with their own unique illness, and in so doing take on their sickness, mixing and multiplying, creating new disasters for mankind. I heard your siren song, the bell tolled by your stagnant longing, and I knew that you were unique." "Unique? Yes, I am a one-of-a-kind ruin." "I have made you what you already were, dragged you, kicking and screaming, into life. Scars such as these are evidence of intercourse with the world." Tears squeezed through the nun's diseased skin like water forcing through a long dry spring. The knight did not take her again. His ear was tilted to the wind--on it, he heard his next calling. He led the nun to the edge of the pine forest and set her blind and naked along the trail to Crystal Bay. Then he quit that place forever. # Her sisters did not recognize her. When she collapsed at the convent gate, they offered no charity save a lice-ridden habit and a stale roll of bread. They thought her a leper and threw these paltry gifts over the wall, so as not to touch her. She carried on. In the wealthy district, high above the water, the rich ridiculed her from their balconies, calling her whore and harlot. A corpulent merchant, to whom she begged, laughed and clasped her lovingly about the shoulders then spun her until she was dizzy, pushing her at last toward the docks. From there she followed the scent of the sea and took refuge in an unclaimed corner of a dingy alley. Visions plagued her. The images from her book danced across a black-curtained stage. She created new delights of her own. She entered the fiery round of hell where she herself turned on a spit amid an unending tangle of limb and orifice linked in infinite variation, and she did not repent. Most of all, she dreamt of the Knight of Rot, her breasts crushed against his cold plate, her tongue seeking the slits of his silver-black helmet. From the mouth of her alley, night after night, she heard men calling to each other at the docks. She went in search of the voices, moaning and clutching her breast like a penitent. One of the men, a dock hand, drunk on rum and a recent string of victories at dice, called to her. "Woman, your moans are music to me. If only you would let me be the cause." "One like you could never match the cause of this; it is far greater. But I would let you hold me, so long as you do not look in my eyes." The man examined her. The shadow of her hood covered her face. Her figure partially suggested itself in spite of the habit. Her bare feet made her appear miserable and child-like. The man approached her. He pulled the hood of her habit over her face as far down as her collar, then he led her past the docks, along the water's edge, into the darkness. Layn is a writer from Wisconsin. His work sits uneasily between the Fantastic and the Horrific. He can usually be found dreaming nightmares by a lake or in the woods somewhere.