Chapter III. Half-Eaten
III
Half-Eaten
The yellow house was not particularly interesting, but she recognized it as soon as she saw it, in the silent and almost magical understanding of dreams. Ariadne touched the walls with a gloved hand, feeling the stucco.
She didn’t know to whom it belonged—to me, it belongs to me—but she knew the corridors like the lines of her own veins.
She wandered in the garden, under the shade of a guava tree, she ate a ladyfinger in the kitchen, she went upstairs.
There was a man strapped to a dental chair in one of the rooms. A man much larger than her. His lower teeth appeared through his lips and he had a protruding jaw, but after she anesthetized him, the man’s face changed to Quaint’s.
It was a shame, to extract such impressive teeth, but she took out his fangs one by one: canines, premolars, molars. I’m doing this for you, she said, but neither voice nor words were hers. Mostly, I’m doing this for myself.
Ariadne woke up. The hotel was white, not yellow, and a light sea breeze blew through the window, brushing her face.
She pulled the wires off her limbs. They had been charging since the previous night, after she took one more glance at Quaint’s shadow before he disappeared into his own room. Ariadne headed to the bathroom and washed her face repeatedly.
The more she tried to ignore the horrible images from her dreams, the more they returned, indistinguishable from the ones of the night before: Quaint’s stained undershirt, his dirty hand lifting her face, the smell of death that surrounded him. They called them food.
Ariadne took a few clothes from her luggage.
Cabaré was located in the wealthiest part of the neighborhood of Flamengo and had been frequented for centuries by the gul elite.
Aren’t they all elite, in a way? she thought bitterly, wearing black leggings under a turtleneck dress.
She wrapped a cardigan around herself to make sure no one would see any piece of her skin outside her face and hands, then checked her purse: phone, wallet, tranquilizers, pain meds.
To her surprise, Quaint wasn’t outside. Guls rarely slept except for a few naps here and there, and only fell into slow-wave sleep during their hibernation period, but they had agreed to go to Cabaré.
His room was empty, the journals were still piled on the desk, the curtains of the terrace fluttered with the wind.
Ariadne opened one of the notebooks out of curiosity, leafing through the pages of a journal from 1948.
Quaint—the word never rolls easily off my tongue, but I will learn, I will learn—promised to help with my French, but he can’t help but laugh whenever I try to communicate with Parisians.
Unlike me, everything seems to come to him without effort: his accent is flawless, his manners impeccable, and there is a certain unworldly aspect to him. It is both charming and unnerving, and reminds me always of my very human imperfection, in a way no other goule makes me feel.
Genebra laughed when I told her; says I flatter him way too much (but later, she admitted: “Quaint has always been like this”).
Ariadne closed the journal, wondering if she could find any clue in Erik’s first steps into the gul world as to how to deal with them. Besides, he didn’t respect my privacy either, she thought with disdain.
“Miss Yurkova?” A hotel worker knocked outside. “There’s a delivery for you.”
“We haven’t ordered any—” Ariadne stopped speaking when she opened the door. Her eyes fell on the bouquet in the man’s arms: red roses wrapped in brown paper and twine, so many of them that the bright green leaves were escaping from their enclosure and several petals fell on the carpeted floor.
The clerk handed her a little envelope from the middle of the bouquet. “Have a good day.”
She unfolded the note and stared at the elegant calligraphy on it, knowing exactly who had sent it as soon as she read the first line:
Ariadne,
Please forgive me for last night. I would not like that to be the image you have of me.
Waiting for you downstairs,
Q.
Ariadne smiled against her better judgment and left the flowers on the table before heading to the ground floor. Quaint was on a leather sofa with his legs crossed, and he lowered the newspaper covering his face when she touched his arm.
“Apology accepted.”
Quaint smiled, folding the paper and leaving it on the chair. “Ready?”
“As ready as I can be. Anything I should know before we go?”
“Cabaré is a three-story house.” Quaint typed the address into the taxi app on his phone. “Invited humans can walk around freely on the first floor. On the second, you should be either accompanied by me, or have permission to go. The third floor, however…”
“What about it?”
“It’s supposed to be a gul-only space, but that’s … not always the case. If need be, I can take you, of course, but strangers would assume that I plan to eat you before the night ends. Or that you’re mad.”
“Mad it is.”
“Don’t make that face.” Quaint locked his phone, and it disappeared into the pocket of his suit. “There’s nothing strange on the first floor, and that’s all we’re seeing today.”
When the taxi arrived, they sat side by side on the backseat, where a small television broadcast the news:… The president has not been seen in public since his treatment started two months ago, sparking rumors of a terminal illness …
“I get the curfew. One party eats, the other terrorizes and controls.” Ariadne stared at the new headline: Civil House criticized again after another assistant had their limbs amputated after a road accident …
“But what about them? What can a dying human tyrant get from all of this? And he is human—you know, I know—he’s a leech that keeps aging as he grows in power. What can he get from this?”
“He’s not afraid to sacrifice his own, clearly,” commented Quaint, his voice low enough to be muffled by the wind. “And guls always take more and more.”
“Quaint. If anything happens…”
“I’ll protect you. Ten pairs, remember?”
“Ten pairs,” Ariadne repeated dully. A dozen teeth scattered on a metal table, bloody and lifeless, like the ivory of elk. “You keep deflecting every time I ask about what happened in 1972. Is Erik’s disappearance related to it?”
Quaint made a thoughtful sound. He was back to his usual self, with a cobalt-blue suit, rings on most fingers, and perfectly combed hair.
“That’s a story for yet another day. We’re here.”
The car stopped in front of a mansion hidden by palm trees, with wrought iron gates that did little to conceal the majestic, eclectic architecture of the upper floors.
The walls were coral, the tallest windows concealed by closed curtains despite the hour, and security guards—presumably human—watched the place.
There were traces of movement on the ground floor, like a couple speaking or a child running, but the closer the windows were to the roof, the more they looked like they were guarding a graveyard.
“There is a Brazilian idiom I quite enjoy,” said Quaint, fingers drumming on the brass knob when they reached the front door.
“I heard it started long ago, when a fire consumed a brothel frequented by wealthy men. While the women ran outside to control the flames, the men’s wives ran into the streets and yelled: ‘Burn, cabaret!’ It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; every time a situation escalates, there’s someone who will say that again, almost as if trying to induce the fire. ”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that most guls are like that, Ariadne.
” Quaint offered his right arm gallantly, and Ariadne accepted it.
“Most of us fall into one of two types. The first does damage control; we know we are harmful by nature, but we try to keep human suffering to a minimum. The others revel in causing pain.”
Quaint opened the door.
The inside of the club was as ostentatious as the outside, and Ariadne was sure that the mansion had changed very little since its inception.
There was an imperial staircase in the middle, where a feeble old woman walked arm in arm with a gul elder, chatting and seemingly unbothered by the predatory look cast upon her as they went to the second floor.
Quaint guided her to the great hall of the first floor, where lunch was served to a handful of select human guests, but she saw glimpses of sunrooms, studies, and even a billiard room.
A band played “Trem das Onze” upstairs, but the song was muffled by doors, ceilings, and walls, and all she could hear was the phantom melody mixed with chatter and laughter from the other tables.
Quaint pulled out her chair for her, but before she could sit, a thundering voice called his name:
“Why, why, if it isn’t Quaint!” A short man displayed a wide smile. His Afro-textured hair was cropped and black, his skin was a very dark shade of brown, and his full beard covered half of his round face. “You didn’t tell me you’d come for the ball. It’s been a while!”
The newcomer pulled Quaint in for a friendly half hug.
“No parties for me this time.” Quaint gave a courteous bow of the head. “Ariadne, meet Augusto, a good friend of mine. He’s the first type I told you about.”
Augusto kissed the back of her hand.
“A pleasure,” he answered, then turned to Quaint with a frown in the middle of his bushy brow. “What are you saying behind my back?”
“It was a compliment, and I was not even thinking about you in the slightest,” chuckled Quaint. “Augusto came from Mozambique to eat slavers, but ended up staying.”
“And you went to France to eat Nazis.” Augusto straightened his shirt, flattening the orange, yellow, brown, and white pattern. “Birds of a feather.”