The Rat King

by emily ann zisko

After recovering from the car crash of a human being that she was in the seminary, Estée found that Ceremony, timeline-wise, began to make more sense. She had been away from the structures of her life—her home village, her family, any chance of earning money—long enough to realize that the years roll like smoke from the burning end of a cigarette that was once a marker of youth and now, a deterrent, a stain, an addiction that killed her grandmother. It was getting time; her mother had said so.

Estée would be the last of her home village to complete Ceremony. These rolling years had brought with them news from where she came from and Estée had watched, a voyeur to a world from which she had left and to which she knew she would eventually return. The voyage to Mecca is always round-trip. Afterall, there was no certain path, no clear role, no societal objective as easily met so soon in her young life. Her still young life! Estée demanded. She told herself she would see a century; Estée was only three turns past a quarter. She had purpose, of course, everyone in a city this expensive had purpose, to which she clung. She was prideful, but of what? Three turns past a quarter with no end. Or too soon. Or sooner than she thought. Luck for a century. Mid-life for the masses. When Estée looked in the mirror, she saw the nicotine-stained fingers of death gripping her once smooth neck where the new rings looked like halos from the ghost of an imagined guillotine.

But Estée is not a pragmatist. Just before she fell asleep each night, sugar plum fairies twisted her ears sweetly, promising her more girlhood; feminine forever, adolescent always. It was neither a dream, nor a nightmare, but the hypnagogic state of a woman's liminal existence; her borders of time more defined than any country crossing.

Still, she thought in her delirium that she could hear the rats pooling at the mouth of the sewers outside like runoff from last year's river cloud. They undulated and made sounds of tidal movement. Her mouth was dry because she slept with it open, to receive.

Estée consulted an oracle; it cost her $95 USD. A woman in the back of a shop that sold rocks. Estée held her palm out to the woman and she touched its heart with her thumb.

"I thought I could learn how to go through myself and come out the other side." Estée said. The woman's warm fingers felt good inside her hands.

"No longer?"

"I think I see things more linearly now." This disappointed the oracle. She continued from an uninspired script.

"You look tired, my child."

"Thank you, my mother." Estée played her part.

"You look poor, my child."

"Thank you, dear wise woman."

"You look hungry, my ghost."

"Yeah, well, you're eating my grocery bill, so."

The oracle hit her hand on the table.

"What do you want me to tell you? That it isn't coming? That you are special, eternal, different? Know better. Think of your mother's hands. When the tide pulls out, all that's left are barnacled rocks. Let me tell you first, girl-baby, it's turning. There is no other choice but to pull on this tail of a rat-king and call that thread a plan."

Estée stood from the table. She towered over the woman.

"Then point me in the direction of the castle and I will pull on the nearest tail."

The oracle pointed west towards the ocean and Estée followed her knobby finger to the Earth's end.

It was dusk and she was wearing tights under her skirt, though it was clear she needn't be. Estée was always wrong in these small unconscious decisions that meant nothing out of context, but added to her overall uncomfortable nature. Restlessness is awkwardness by another name. She took off her boots and walked through the sand in her stocking feet, the webbing between her toes creating seal fins that dragged her forward.

She sat cross legged on the beach and watched the people for a long time: tourists mostly, packing up after a day out. As much as she knew of other people's lives, Estée saw that there was an ease, even a boredom to the rhythm of their days. She was obsessed with knowing people's daily routines to better self-flagellate for never being satisfied with any of her own. Estée asked the people she knew what time they went to sleep and how they spent their money and she listened to their stories, bewildered. She felt as though every morning, she arose only to twist hourly through consciousness with a delayed and stilted understanding, as if trying to read in a dream. But her days began and ended the same as theirs. In the evenings, Estée worked as all ambitious women with respectable but unconnected relations do: as a governess to a wealthy family. The child, whom she used her education at the seminary to teach about the unread books of what felt like a long time ago, had a life of gilded-leaf.

Unsurprisingly, the ideas she tried to impart to him fell from him like water off the back of a loon-bird. Estée felt guilty for hating him so completely, and worried that she would never be free of children before having to have them herself. But she thought she did want to have them. The vagina is the last magic hat on Earth. On the beach, a child said goodbye to her castle, so lovingly and laboriously tended to in the sand, by jumping on its parapet and kicking in the turret.

It was so strange; the women she knew that had completed Ceremony understood something Estée struggled to. Ironically, they seemed to reap gold from the feudal bonds that kept them isolated, but offered them credibility, respect, and if not wealth, at least, stability. When these women completed Ceremony, they looked unafraid. Estée was rapt by their anthropological beauty. Their veiled portraits archived an achievement passed for millennia from the first sale of a woman. Though their stock had gone down, their price had gone up. In a bad year, Estée earned the average cost of a modern Ceremony. Estée's mother told her that only failures teach, and she was just a tutor.

It was dark now. It would not be long now. What's a girl to do? Estée stood and walked towards the lights of the pier to stand under the neon mist of the ferris wheel. It's circular arch moved her forward like a greased wheel.

In her home village, as a girl, she had jumped from a bridge the same height of the pier, only to grab hold of a rope in the dark waters and trace night-glow algae with her fingertips along the rocks lining the tunnel. The current moved the rope towards the back bay then, and she had felt hopeful, hanging on at its end, that everything moved towards the mouth of something bigger.

Through the din of carnival music, she heard the sound of a pooling tide of something other than water, down from the sewer drain and under the pier, up onto the damp sand in the darkness under the boardwalk. They did not move as people feared, with a scurry and scuttle of screech and squeak. Rather, they moved like rocks rolling back towards the ocean, towards a quieting wash that took all memory away. Estée made her way under the pier.

It was dark there and loud with something natural. The water was moving, quickly, through the damp underneath of the boardwalk and towards something she could not yet see, but hear. It was a popping and hissing and seething sharp sound that hurt Estée's ears, metallic. She tried to crack her jaw around the noise, but it maintained. The rocks and shell bits caught up in the tide and hit her ankles, as the fast moving water pushed her closer to the moving pack of rats.

Estée watched the rodents that escaped from the perimeter, breaking from the mass with abandon, while the core of the king moved like a wave of legs and heads and biting teeth and dark, oiled fur. The water behind Estée continued to rise, lapping, laughing, at her to move, closer and closer towards the twisting mass of one thousand small lives all joined by the knot of their tails. The screeching, panting mass vibrated in front of her, the flash of claws and pink skin drowning in a screaming heap of blackened writhing. Through the mass she saw the green of one clear eye that stared at her with fury and fear. The water retreated, briefly, though Estée knew it would only go farther now. And she felt as if she was destined to be here, and she was, unexpectedly, grateful to tear through and allow herself to change. To see through and back to the other side. She stepped beyond the tide's wake, closer to the edge of the king's throne, and fell to her knees, laying her hands in front of her in surrender.

Estée's forehead pressed grittily into the sand. She waited as the mass hummed. She was silent in her waiting, until the tail of a rat unknowingly swiped over the back of her hand. She caught it fast in her fingers. The wave crested behind her and the tide surged under her as she held, her eyes stinging with sand and salt, to the screaming tail in her fist. Pull on the tail of this rat king and call that thread a plan. This was the plan: to surrender, to receive, to reap. She kept her head down as they descended onto her as she expected they would; crawling muddily up her arms, into her hair, biting at the tender flesh of her cartilage. She felt more coming now, the waves cresting with the rats like two currents meeting, colliding, clinging onto her, consuming her. Their smell, like death and yellowed pus, pushed its way past the sea-spray smell of oyster shells.

A rat wriggled from behind Estée and in between her folded legs to bite viciously at the inside of her thigh. She felt its hair, coarse and pubic, at her knee and its front and back paws holding itself between her legs. She screamed loud and high, but could not distinguish herself from the screeching rodents as she felt the flash of what seemed to be a human hand on her navel. The rats at her neck moved their snouts in a flurry along her throat and began biting her, sucking at her nape as more hands, yes, hands now began pulling on her: her stomach and neck and arms. Downward, the sharp-clawed hands pulled. Estée's body resisted the gravel surface of the wet sand, then succumbed, went gelatin, her bones folding within herself, pushed from above and pulled from below. Dig a hole all the way to China.

She was floating, falling then, her body parachuting in all directions. And the hands that had pulled her now held her, but not upright, she was falling with them. It was dark and silent now. She felt she might feel peace. The hands were of soft leather that felt better than skin as they roved over her body, their talons curved, tracing sharp lines down the length of her spine.

They were beautiful now; the rats that were men. Their heads still held their rodent shape, but much larger; black hair jetting between velvet ears close to the sides of their faces, their snouts long and whiskered but tapered in a soft muzzle that exposed the mouth below and the very-human teeth. The green of their eyes held something else than fear. She could not quite tell but there seemed to be about three of them now; their bodies human-like in their nakedness, their hands everywhere. She let her body float to them in a sigh: secret destroyers of men, plague-ridden flea-shepherds of death. Her head fell backward as she felt hands, paws, score her body, ripping her clothes and pulling at her hair.

Her mouth parted as a curved claw rolled over her nipples. Estée's breath caught in her throat as she felt another at her ankle, slowly dragging his jaw upward along her inner leg, the fur at his muzzle as soft as the swish of his tail wrapped around the arch of her foot. They positioned her so that she could take them all into her then, the one between her legs pushing deeply. Estée flexed her mouth around the third to take the pain of the first from behind her. They steadied her with their hands on her hips, her ribs, her neck and she looked into the eyes above her. He stared at her with unending awe, unwavering lust, and she bit him with frustration. She had eight limbs, four heads, was made mythical through these men that turned her into a beast. She knew them so well in their human groans and animal screams. But without them, she was void, empty, in need to perpetually receive. Falling and failing. That fucking Ceremony. The death knell of creation. The institution of compliance. Feminine forever, adolescence always. She dragged from their moans her fury, sucking their life source out of them and into her. To take. She tensed her muscles around their screams and held them in the core of her body as they aged on her, withered, their black snouts graying and their green eyes clouding with cataracts, willing them to see all the people that came before and after her, from her. A procession of life walking out of the door of her abdomen. I am every man alive. She felt the waves crash on her, the taste of brine in her mouth and her knees finally touched ground.

Estée stood from the bodies of the rat-men, heaped, senseless and sensitized, and looked around herself. A black, watery field spreads flat in every direction, and above: the moon, fish-eyed through the curve of this new Earth. A large tree in the middle of the field was only a few yards away. Estée walked to it. There was a hole in the true middle of the trunk: a glowing red core pulsing inside the bark, a knothole of neon vermillion that reminded her of the ferris wheel on the pier whose movement charted the path between worlds.

Estée moved her hand into the heart and pulled from its core a sword made of bone.

When she turned back, two of the rats were holding the third's arms, his knees bent in an upright sitting posture, his calves under the claws of their feet. He did not move. He did not bow his white head. His clouded eyes beheld her without fear. She was coming into something. "You need me more than I need you," she told him. His nose twitched as she raised the sword and brought it down. But only one swing. The bone was sharp. The cut was clean. Estée smelled his blood as it pooled at her feet and sprayed her shins. She felt young but not girlish. The two others moved away on all fours, hideously splashing towards the dark, their spines curving in their too long bodies, claws grasping, tails trailing behind them, skimming the wet ground with their noses that sniffed and tongues that tinged. And they were gone.

Estée lifted the aged head from its pool of red, holding onto its top hair in one hand and her sword of bone in the other, and began walking through the murk. She did not know where she was going because she had nowhere to go, and from that sense of nothingness she continued.

Up ahead, she saw the baby blush light of a sugar plum fairy that bobbed and dipped, flying deeper into the watery horizon. The fairy was a cherubic mass of curdling baby fat and gills. Its wings were webbed for an aquatic life of flight. The land was water on all sides, as if the earth and the air gave way to the flat of the ocean, and to walk through it was to move towards it.

Estée did not think she was submerged in water; there was not that sense of floating. But she could see the ripples of her wake in all directions. Maybe she had died. She walked on, guided by the illuminated wings of the sewer sprite. On and on. Estée thought of becoming her mother; how easy it would be to become someone already. From that thought alone, she knew she was not dead. Maybe the treasure hunt never ends. The cold head grew heavy on her limp wrist, her arm could not lift it away from her body and she felt the sticky brains drip down the side of her thigh. Her sword dragged behind her like a tail.

Finally, when the fairy lights held steady at either side of another large throne, Estée fell to her knees before it in exhausted relief. At least she was somewhere. The head, her offering, rolled towards and rested at the foot of the King of Rats. She met his green eyes. For a moment, she thought she recognized him. She almost called out to him. He was tall in his chair and wore a crown of brilliant gold. She was bare before him but unafraid.

"I have come in search of the Rat King." Estée said. Her voice was weak.

"You have killed my strongest man." The Rat King said.

"I wanted more."

"Is that why you search for me?"

"I am not searching. I am alive, I think. And you are here. I don't know what to make of you. I feel as though I have changed. The Oracle told me my prophecy was to pull on the tail of the King of Rats."

"And you believed her?"

"I'll follow any advice once."

He laughed then, revealing big white canines under his coal-black snout, and the sound was deep but high at its truest notes: boyishness lingering. She laughed, too, because aside from him, in this place, she didn't know about anything else. And he was a history of monsters living underground.

"Have you changed?" She asked him.

"Clearly not as much as you."

"I am more remarkable than you in all things. I am a portal to the divine. Did you know that?"

"Yes." The fairies watched over her in their light and she thought of what they had promised her in her dreams, but she didn't hate him.

"If I invite you to stay, will you?" He asked.

"I think so. I'm very tired. " She said.

"Have you traveled far?"

"How could you ask me that?" She snapped at him as if they knew each other.

"I'm sorry." He said. "I can't offer you much but -"

He knelt down beside her and wrapped a cloak over her shoulders. She saw more of him when he moved: his young, long body. How his whiskers were short and his eyes bright. That his claws were clean and the pads of his hands hardened.

"--what I have is yours."

"You don't know my intentions in coming here. I could kill you."

"Not yet, at least." His tail was as black as the fur on his head, and he circled her with it, the end brushing over her knee protectively. He smiled at her. She lifted it in her hand, feeling the bits of cartilage that made up the end of him. She gave it a little tug, playfully.

"If I ask you to marry me, will you?" He said. She looked up at him.

"Will you? Estée?" He took her hand in his.

"Why would you ask me that?" She asked, but genuinely.

"Make this commitment to me now, when we are young enough to try but have been alive long enough to know that it does not get easier alone. I'm coming on strong, it's true. Unavoidable. I want to go to heaven. I want to be in love. If I told you that I love you would you believe that I mean it? I see the light pooling in orbs under your skin and I smell on you the tang of forever. It's the fountain of youth, the thirst of an everwell, a promise made within me now, bound by inevitable change. I want to change, I want to see you change, to turn over and inside out. I do not want to look back then, I only want to look up, at you. I promise. Please, Estée, I love you. I really do. I think you and I are made of the same stuff. It's hard to explain. I'm embarrassed. I'll make a mess of it all. But can you imagine the optimism, absurd hope, it takes to try to weave a life into one and maybe, make another? I want to be ridiculous. How luxurious!

And you, glorious you! There you are. It makes me giddy. It's volcanic; old and primal but red-hot restorative, destroyative, unbelievable. You are so incredibly, unbelievably beautiful. Unflinchingly young and impossibly old. I see generations in you. I see a whole world in you. Endless knowledge. Unmitigated power. I know I love you. I will forever. You are forever. Please Estée, you vampire, you god, make me eternal, too."

"I never want to give up." Estée whispered.

"Do you think so little of me?" He asked but his eyes were kind. She puts her hand on his face, offering him the smell of her wrist, the vastness of her skin. Estée pressed her lips to his.

She breathed into his mouth.

"Is that all there is to it, then?" She sighed, leaning away.

"Was it so difficult?"

"Yes, even now. Am I still the same? Do I want the same things? We are meant for each other in that we are meant for someone, something, somehow. Survival is easier together, I know this. But I'm not a pragmatist. I love to write my dreams in books. I think they are playing out somewhere now. When I was young, it didn't feel like I could be fully myself if someone else saw me as whole. Now, I am holey myself. I'm not sure many see it. I think it is a rare thing. Almost unimaginable. I often don't agree with it."

"Will you sit by my side upon your throne?" He asked, leading her up and to his gilded chair. There was another, the same now, at its side. As Estée stood, she felt the weight of six new heads, swiveling with her clear eyes on new necks sprouting from her spine. She took her seat.

The Rat King put his hand in her palm.

Time passes. It is another movement. The direction of which does not matter. Forward, by any other name. That's hopeful. That's happily. But when Estée's heads turn about her, she feels as though she does not know which one had been the original, after all.