Sarahribu

Black magic in general is a tedious business, all chicken guts and the lust of virgins, far easier to bottle than virtue and more effective in the long run. Mademoiselle would generally sit and stir and fret, taking on the odd job of a love potion or a tedious revenge, and watch the pennies roll in. All the best black magicians are French, so he of course puts on the illusion, magic is all showbusiness these days. The petite raven haired goddess sits on a stool more delicately than a hulking brute ever could and the curves of hers he wears cushion his joints so softly that when he slips out of her in the evening and hangs her up he barely creaks. She was just so beautiful.

Of course he never sees the man’s face when he first comes by, that would be rude, a violation of the very blackness of the black arts to have the illusion of a busy-body too. Mademoiselle is coy beneath her veil, and he listens through her ears to this abhorrent demand. She has never split a man before, and neither has he, not even the King Warlock he learnt his craft of had handmade a Mandragora before, let alone split a man into earth and hate and parts and sewn them back together into twins. The client, as he now obviously had to become, spoke of loneliness with the twinge of the brand of sadness particular to the self-absorbed. Something tedious and over reactionary about a lost companion and subsequent failed necromancy, now he just wants something, everything, the magical reciprocal love. He almost recommends a whore, surely that would be more useful than a masturbation fantasy of selfcest and eternal companionship? But what is another heresy in the world, how much harm could a split-soul wank-stain wreak on God’s already blackened city?

The man says he will return when Mademoiselle indicates she is willing. They make no time, and it is weeks before the driving rain parts to show a tall figure shifting uneasily, jabbering nothing, following Mademoiselle like a kitten through the streets to the anonymous townhouse. Mademoiselle removes his work-clothes and hangs her up, and smirks a big brown smile at the gaping look. The man is handsome out of the rain; the whole affair is really quite the pity.

Black magicians don’t tend to do conventional spell techniques, there is little meditation or candle work to be faffed around with, and so Mademoiselle takes the man’s hand and pushes him in the centre of his chest down onto the chair. There are anatomical problems with turning a man into a twin, diploid to haploid, dust to dust. The heart must split but the bile can’t boil, and the book is insistent the lobotomy cannot be too rushed. The pipes and liquids and effluence must be rewired and tied off neatly before you can even think to split the metaphysical, the person from the personality and what was the human from the humanity. The earth helps, the clay reforms what was never there in the shape of what was, it takes the shape of the man and is bound. And so when the guts spill and the man screams inevitable curses and blasphemies, the earth reaches up, full of mother’s milk and the life force of gods and all the little pixies and fills the lungs till they are blesséd and silent.
In the end the procedure was a reassuringly short one, an hour at the most. A sawbones would take longer to fix a bad break, and so it is surprising at the least that it takes Mademoiselle as long to tear a man in half and mould him back together. He sits back on his heels, hands and arms spattered with the core of the man, gore and earth mixed together evocative of the battlefields of France where he learnt his craft. The rich iron tang of slain bodies and the clean mud-luscious taste mixed together are the building blocks of civilised life; the battlefields of Europe after all are vineyards now; unstoppably verdant and shockingly fertile as they turn life force to wine.

The…men, as they are now, are asleep and Mademoiselle cannot help but feel proud of his work. He pulls them round into the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window and admires his work; the bodies are smooth; they crackle as they dry and as the magic settles down into is place, continuing on its own to bind the infernal seams, the patchwork quilt of the seeping darkness. The dark mud skin is paper-thin and just inside you can make out the secrets and guts nestled together like pomegranate seeds in their collusive membrane. The men look darkly innocent, slender half-bodies slowly gaining form, trunk arms punctuated with long root fingers that need to suck up the sun if they are to lose their sickening translucency. The men need a week of solid photosynthesis out of the London soup but he can’t imagine a weekend by the sea is on the cards. He just hopes whatever hovel they crawl in to gets just enough light to bring life fully into their shells, or this whole thing will end up a waste.

Mademoiselle tidies up slowly, scrubbing the blood from the floor and burning the chair in ritual thanks. It takes another hour for the first fluttering of life to manifest and then in the twilight of the soup-stew London night the men wake, opening their eyes onto a strange dual world. The connection between the halves of the brain is tenuous and latent, it will be gone within a few hours, leaving them to develop personalities independent and distinct, dexter and sinister, the logical manifestations of physical left and right. They stagger to their feet and fall, climb up again, clinging to each other as if in a three-legged race after an afternoon of beer. Their tongues won’t work for days, if they master speech again at all. They indicate a parcel of money and Mademoiselle smiles a big friendly smile, all customer service and points to the door. They amble out like deranged fawns and disappear, melting into the anonymous hustle of the city.

Its only when he goes to pull the girl back on for his evening hours that he realises exactly what he has done, and instead of flogging love potions to the blind goes out as himself and proceeds to get extremely, devastatingly shitfaced, until he lying in the gutter, screaming apologies to the universe.