Toxicosis: Feral Rebirth, #2

By Alison Armstrong

"My fingers quiver, jerking in electrified spasms as pulsations, craving, hungry, insatiable, surge from the tiny, cold, motionless tabby. Defying gravity, the pulsations shoot upwards from my fingers to my hand, my arm, shoulder, and neck, throbbing at my jaw like raggedy velvet hammers on the strings inside a piano…summoning my fangs from their swollen sheaths. . . . I force the bitter, fishy droplets down my throat, then tear into the vein on my wrist, watching as my blood splatters onto the kitten's mouth."

 

A sequel to Revenance, Toxicosis is a surreal, hallucinatory novel featuring supernatural beings, psychotropic feline muses, and deranging diseases. Contagion lures, infestation gestates, and feral energies resurrect as the vampires in Revenance encounter sinister entities. Sustaining themselves on the blood of the despairing, the female vampire, aka "Ligeia," and her Awakener, "Cinaed," evade perilous attachments by assuming aliases and changing hotels. Their immortal survival, however, is endangered by Aloysius (alias "Allen"), a vampire from Cinaed's past. Obsessed with pharmacological research into psychedelic substances, Aloysius finds the perfect experimental subject when he meets Don, a wealthy gourmand infested with maggots. Meanwhile, Ligeia and Cinaed inadvertently discover the hallucinogenic effects of feline virus Toxoplasma gondii when they rescue two dying kittens and revive them with vampire blood. After ingesting the psychedelic Toxoplasma blood from the kittens, Ligeia is haunted by menacing presences that try to drive her insane. Cinaed, in turn, is threatened by Aloysius, who steals one of the vampire kittens to use for his experiments. As Ligeia and Cinaed battle otherworldly entities, they learn the destructive as well as creative possibilities of their enhanced supernatural perceptions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alison Armstrong
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215719541

Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in Leeds and East Yorkshire and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and a Project Grant from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. She now makes her home in Lancashire, and Fossils is her first book. 

Book preview

To Nicki for her love, support, assistance, and helpful suggestions; to my mom and grandparents, who, though departed, live on forever in my heart; to my stepbrother, whose inner strength and humor have brightened the darkest times; to Michael Easton, whose inspiration and encouragement have helped nurture my creativity, and to all of my loved ones, living and dead.

Note: Toxicosis describes a fictional scenario inspired by accounts of the Toxoplasma gondii virus associated with cats. It is also inspired by the fascination cats continue to have in our consciousness as sublime predators, graceful and enigmatic. These references are meant to be in homage to cats as creatures of adoration, worship, fear, and mystery. They are in no way intended to represent actual events or to imply that cats are dangerous. I see cats as muses, reflecting our own obsessions and embodying our ideals of beauty as well as our nightmarish visions. As a cat lover, I celebrate the power they have over our minds and hearts. The cats in the story, like the main vampire characters, are creatures of dream and fantasy, mythic entities invigorating our thoughts and imagination.

Serenade

I listen to the cats outside our window, the ancient sounds tingling inside me, stirring memories mammalian but not yet human. My ears pound, waves crashing, blood gurgling. I envy them, my fellow fanged cousins, wishing to share their wordless grace.

Ever since I was a child, I had wanted to be an animal, particularly a cat. Lying awake at night, I would imagine myself changing shape, prickles of bristled hair sprouting from my cheeks to form whiskers, upper lip narrowing and curling towards my nose in a perpetual feline rictus, teeth sharpening and stabbing the soft tissue inside my mouth. My fingers would claw into my pillow, tearing the cotton casing as I smelled the feather remains of some long-dead fattened fowl. Eyes closed, I would savor the phantom transfiguration, believing that the longer I remained in my self-curtained darkness, the stronger and more enduring the magic would become. Even at that young age, I hated being human, hated the schism dividing body and mind, sensory experience and consciousness. The human body in all its mutinous mortality continually humiliated the arrogant cerebral despot assuming dominion, while the mind, censorious, subjugating, yearned to abandon its rebellious, untrustworthy servant.

Words, buzzing, whispering words intrude, prissy, gossipy narrators. I try to ignore them, but once they enter, these guests cannot be uninvited. Unlike us, they do not have to ask permission to infect. Through this veneer of words, I eavesdrop on the cats’ primeval courtship, feeling, with language-blunted echoes, their sensations.

The song and musk entice her, low, rumbling snarls, scent dark and pulsing as her blood, making her haunches rise. She screams her song, high, yearning, trilling.

His teeth pierce her neck, his claws grab her hips, as something stabs her deep inside. She shrieks, a song of pain and aching, craving life.

Someone from the apartment next door bellows at our serenaders, demanding their silence. Shut the fuck up, you damned cats! the male voice roars, and his shout is followed soon after by a clinking of glass.

The cat duet pauses briefly but then resumes. Nothing can deter the frenzied impulse that is stronger than shouts or curses or even flung glass.

There is a final screech, guttural, tormented, triumphant, a release as sublime in its impaled ecstasy as St. Teresa’s mystical rapture. The screech slowly grows fainter, disappearing with a soft, melodic sigh, like the whisper of an angel bestowing benediction.

Her womb has been filled. Blessed with the fecundity of her feline forebears, the soon-to-be mother cat ceases her song. I turn away from the window, saddened by the silence as my mind, inundated with words, babbles ceaselessly.

Dream Performance

White wings, powdered like an 18th century wig, flutter by my motionless eyelids and then lift the moth’s fragile, ethereal form towards the flickering fluorescent tube overhead. A sizzle and a fragrance of singed lace are all that remains of her glory-driven ascent.

I get up from the lumpy hotel bed and turn off the light, welcoming the last fleeting hour or so of darkness before the dawn brings torpor and paralyzing sleep. Unlike the moth, fluorescence holds no allure for me. Having temporarily sated my thirst and hunger, I banish thoughts of my sacrificial meal, surrendering to the sleep-foreshadowing visions that lurk in the corners of my sight, the dusky revenant shapes of memories transformed and surreally refashioned.

Sinking wearily into the scratchy, over-bleached sheets, I hear as if from an echoing theatre the song Sweet Dreams slowed to a funereal pace. The singer, neither Annie Lennox nor Marilyn Manson but some banshee-wailing vocalist hidden behind blood-red curtains, summons the ceremony to begin. Sluggishly, as if stirred from slumber by a chanteuse snake charmer, the curtains slither, parting to reveal a white screen.

A performance, part-movie, part stage show, begins with a melodramatic film documentary featuring myself in a starring role. Bandages conceal most of my face and head except for narrow slits for my eyes and ears and a small portion of my mouth, making me resemble a mummy or the horrific gauze-wrapped patient, Simone Choule, in the movie The Tenant. My mouth, like Simone’s, remains a dark void amidst the whiteness, a black hole of gruesome expressionistic horror, Munch’s The Scream stifled by a surgical shroud. Tubes connect me to fluids of various sorts and machines monitoring vital functions. I watch myself in the film as I lie in a hospital bed within the theatre.

The red curtains close, blocking the film screen, and onto the stage my childhood nightmare creation Morbidy Graham appears, dressed as a magician.  Removing a black top hat from his bone white hair, he places it on a red-clothed table, and, with limp, cyanotic fingers, reaches inside. From the velvet caverns of the hat, he retrieves a squirming, squealing white rabbit with amputated ears.

There’s more where he came from, Morbidy proclaims. His emaciated face, the color of chicken gristle, grimaces. All the what-ifs, everything that can be imagined is within that boundless hat. Do you dare to reach inside? Morbidy cups a hand to his ear, as if straining to hear an affirmative reply.

What, no answer? he taunts. Cat got your tongue? or are you just a scaredy cat? No matter. I’ll be back, and the show will go on and on and on.

He then waves a silver wand and disappears.

The curtains rustle, slithering again like serpents, and the Sweet Dreams requiem version resumes. From the right side of the stage a thin, beautiful but somewhat eerie woman emerges, naked except for a diaphanous body-length scarf, a shimmering pearlescent belt and a matching necklace from which the small, whitish kernel-shaped forms of children’s teeth, mine among them, glisten. Her lustrous black hair, long and twisted into seaweed strands, falls almost to the floor as she dances. The necklace clinks softly, accompanying the lullaby lamentation with the sound of faraway wind chimes, the Tooth Fairy’s requiem for innocence lost, seduced away, never to be reclaimed.

Still dancing, she drifts back into the red curtain, cloaking her nakedness within its velvet softness, then disappearing within its billowing folds.

The song begins again, repeating like an automated recording on a help desk phone line when all the operators are busy. I watch the curtains billow slightly, as if they are breathing impatiently also, waiting for the show to continue.

Suddenly, just as I feel my vision darkening, my dream eyes closing behind the narrow-slitted, bandage-wrapped shrouds, the red curtains are pulled back violently, and a glaring, snow-blinding, razor-sharp light sears my eyes. It is so bright that I cannot glimpse anything for a moment except the sight-shattering whiteness. Gradually, though, a shape breaks away from the annihilating albinic field─a tall, slender man with long, dark hair and eyes the color of a seductively engulfing sea, the one I now know as my Awakener.

Drawn into his gaze, I feel as if I am hovering on an oceanside precipice, ready to plunge into the wave-tossed abyss. The tubes connecting me to hospital-imprisoned existence have been severed, and the threads connecting me to my immobile body are being stretched, pulled by him ever closer to the edge. The threads dangle and fray, casting me unresistingly into the devouring depths. I feel the sharp, gouging rocks and the ravenous sucking of a whirlpool, taste the salt and brine that seeps into my throat.

I awaken to the sound of a gurgling drain, last night’s bath water still resisting the clog-weakened suction. Beside me, my Awakener stirs restlessly.

The gurgling noises arouse his thirst. Last night’s host, an emphysemic taxi driver craving one last smoke, had been uninspiring, the blood sawdust-dry, the dying dreams mere smoke-ringed delusions of nicotine banality.

From the room where my musician friend Spitz Nevus used to live, the new hotel guest, having arrived back for the night, blasts his stereo. Accompanied by a nerve-deadening upbeat hip hop tempo, chipmunk-modulated vocals chirrup about booties, boobs, and bling with all the passion and sensuality of an embalmed sex slave. Spitz, if not already deceased, would have welcomed death rather than hear another moment of this abominable ditty.

I can feel the sad, defeated whoosh of departing spirits—the artists, muses, and dope-infused dreamers of the Chelsea Hotel. They are flying away in disgust, tattered spore-dusted wings carrying them towards another haven to infest. We, too, can stay here no longer.

Alias

We rummage through our belongings at the hotel, deciding what to discard and what to bring to our new home. Having lived for the past two centuries in a semi-nomadic existence, my Awakener has few possessions with him; most of the cherished mementoes from his long life are scattered amongst his various residences in Europe and New York. For now, though, he prefers living in hotels, especially ones that appeal to musicians, writers, and other creative artists, for in them the blood has the taste of desire, terror, or transfiguring grief. He would love to taste the blood of a filmmaker someday, he says, so that he could watch the movie of the filmmaker’s life unspool in dark cinematic arcs, fadeouts and merges, trickling slow epiphanies. In the meantime he satisfies his cinephilia by borrowing films from the library, particularly those by his favorite directors, David Lynch and David Cronenberg. The borrowed movies, a DVD player, a laptop, our small assortment of clothes and books, our writing journals, and some objects of sentimental or practical value are the only items we are taking with us. Anything else we can do without or buy later.

Throughout his centuries of existence, my Awakener has lived in many different countries and assumed many names. The names are disguises, masks concealing his undying identity, bandages covering the wounds of his past. They hide the scars festering within him and protect his vulnerability. His real name, revealed only to me and the deceased loved ones he left behind, I never use except in hushed, sacred tones unheard by mortal ears. Like a magic incantation shrouded in mystery, it must not be disclosed except to others of our kind. No matter what form his public name may take, however, he will always be My Awakener, the giver of a new life liberated from the bonds of leaking, aging, disease-encoded flesh.

Sorting through a pile of books to be packed, he selects an ancient, anonymous leather-bound tome entitled Names: Their Meanings, Symbolism, and Origins. A new home, and, now, a new name, he announces, flipping through the gold-edged pages. He closes his eyes, picking a page at random, then places his finger on the page. The book has a sort of magic, you see, he explains. It chooses a name for me, not just any name, but one with the right meaning for the right moment.

His finger rests against a description of the name Cinaed, born of fire. Closing the book, he tells me the name, pronouncing it slowly (KIN-ahd). He savors the cutting sounds it makes, the chokingly dry rasp of consonants ending in a strangulated sigh like the slashing of fangs into a gasping throat and the listless seeping of blood into a ravenous mouth.

Saying the name again, this time in a whisper, he rubs his lips against my neck. Now your turn, he murmurs. Let the book give you a new alias.

Tentatively, I take the book from his hands. Ever since the divination cards I had as an adolescent foretold my early death, I have been wary of accessing oracles. Closing my eyes, I open the book and point my finger at a page. 

My fingertip touches the name—Ligeia, meaning shrill, one of the Sirens from Greek mythology. The book is apparently too old to have known of Edgar Allan Poe’s revenant with that name, but both the mythic and the literary associations give this name a perfect resonance. I whisper the name, feeling the liquid flow of syllables upon my tongue and palate.

Time to celebrate my fiery rebirth and your shrill, hungry reawakening, Cinaed says softly. In blood we shall baptize ourselves. In the harvest of our veins we shall take within ourselves each other’s secrets and begin together our new journey."

We lie down upon the lumpy mattress, the creak of crippled, overworked springs serenading us one last time. My lips and tongue caress his neck. The taste of him—musk, amber, ocean brine—entices my fangs to sample his arousing essence. As I bite into his silken flesh, I grab a handful of his long, lustrous hair, twisting it between my fingers, breathing in its orchid-scented darkness. I want to bury my face in it, suffocate myself in its fragrance.

His blood is a deep ocean of memories. Eyes closed, I let the visions from his mind flow into me, mixing with remembrances of my own past and phantom visitations from other times, other realms. Identities blur. I seem to inhabit multiple selves, including some previously unknown to me but now strangely familiar, as if the blood cells themselves have memories of stolen life.

***

Iron-gray waves splash against jagged black rocks as he watches from a tower window overlooking the sea below. The room is dark, lit only by a few candles. He lies upon the bed, his fingers moving quickly under the sheets, his lust growing the more urgently he yearns for his phantom visitor to arrive. The sound of waves and wind chimes heralds her approach. He sees her drifting from the sea, a white mist arching and spiraling like the billowing of a scarf in a gentle breeze. The scarf elongates, taking the shape of the woman he desires—the Lady of Sea Foam and Mist. She glides across the short expanse of rock-strewn ground separating land from sea, and, with long, white, graceful hands knocks at his window.

***

June bugs rattle against my screens, and my tooth throbs, wobbling on a fraying, bloody thread. I hear a lulling hiss, like the sound of waves and see a billowing, diaphanous scarf blowing outside in the lantern-lit backyard.

***

He opens the latch, and she enters. Easing herself down upon his jutting mound of sheets, she rubs her slender hips back and forth, clenching and releasing. Her dark hair, like a tangled thicket of lustrous black seaweed, partially shrouds her beautiful, pale face. Her eyes are like abalone, luminous yet milky with moonlit mysteries.

***

The night pulsates with heat and frenzy, insect legs and wings rubbing, summoning, lustily soliciting while the swollen moon entices the tides to flood, then subside. Reaching a crescendo, the rattling insect chorus slowly fades as the scarf, like a veil of mist, glides across the yard and drifts towards my window. It slips through the holes in my screen and billows around my bed, gradually