daause.blogg.se - Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite

I had to ask her to explain them to me, these deathers. Each grave has its own peculiar scent, just as each living body does.īy day Rosalie wore black: lace and fishnet, leather and silk, the gaudy mourning clothes of the deather-children. I thought the thing still retained a trace of the grave's scent - a dark odor like potatoes long spoiled. Every cross and swirl of the veve was reproduced to perfection. Whoever was buried in that lonely bayou grave, he had been no mere dabbler in swamp magic. Etched in exquisite miniature upon the sliver of bone, and darkened by the rubbing in of some black-red substance, was an elaborate veve - one of the symbols used by voodooists to invoke their pantheon of terrible gods. Set into the metal, a single ruby sparkled like a drop of gore against the verdigris. A polished sliver of bone (or a tooth, but what fang could have been so long, so sleekly honed, and still have somehow retained the look of a human tooth?) bound by a strip of copper. Have I neglected to describe the magical object, the voodoo fetish from the churned earth of the grave? I will never forget it. I had not taken seriously Louis's talk of making love in a charnel-house - but neither had I reckoned on the pleasure he could inflict with a femur dipped in rose-scented oil.Īgainst the sculpted hollow of Louis's throat, the thing on its chain seemed more strangely beautiful than ever. We had baubles and precious heirlooms, vermiculated prayer-books and shrouds encrusted with mold.

We scraped bone dust and nitre from the bottoms of ancient coffins we stole the barely withered heads and hands of children fresh in their graves, with their soft little fingers and their lips like flower petals. We heard of a girl with violet eyes who had died in some distant town not seven days later we had those eyes in an ornate cut-glass jar, pickled in formaldehyde.

We travelled far in our collections, but always we returned home with crates full of things no man had ever been meant to possess.

short story by Poppy Z.We spent a happy time refurbishing the museum, polishing the inlaid precious metals of the wall fixtures, brushing away the dust that frosted the velvet designs of the wallpaper, alternately burning incense and charring bits of cloth we had saturated with our blood, in order to give the rooms the odor we desired - charnel perfume strong enough to drive us to frenzy.

A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of Poppy.

Collection Title: Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories