Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw.
Title: Nothing But Blackened Teeth.
Author: Cassandra Khaw.
Genre: Fiction, horror, ghost story, haunted house.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2021.
Summary: A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company. It's the perfect venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends brought back together to celebrate a wedding. A night of food, drinks and games quickly spirals into a nightmare as secrets get dragged out and relationships are tested. But the house has secrets too. Lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart. And she gets lonely down there in the dirt. A haunted house story of grief, the parasitic nature of relationships, and the consequences of our actions.
My rating: 3/10
My review:
♥ He shrugged, smile cocked like the sure thing that was his whole life.
♥ In the dusk, the letters of his name were gilt and glory and good stitching. Poster-boy perfect: every one craved him like a vice.
♥ Have you ever cannonballed into a cold lake? The shock of an old memory is kind of like that; every neuron singing a bright hosanna: here we are. You forgot about us, but we didn't forget about you.
♥ His hands fluttered up and fell in time with the backseat of his confession. Phillip's expression cragged with the guilt he'd held for years like a reliquary. This wasn't the first time we'd had this conversation. This wasn't even the tenth, the thirtieth.
Truth was, I hated that he still felt guilty. It wasn't charitable but apologies didn't exonerate the sinner, only compelled graciousness from its recipient. The words, each time they came, so repetitive that I could tune a clock to their angst, sawed through me. You can't move forward wen someone keeps dragging you back.
♥ Growing up where we did, back in melting-pot Malaysia, down in the tropics where the mangroves spread dense as myths, you knew to look for ghosts. Superstition was a compass: it steered your attention through thin alleys, led your eyes to crosswalks filthy with makeshift shrines, offerings and appeasements scattered by traffic. The five of us spent years in restless pilgrimage, searching for the holy dead in Kuala Lumpur. Every haunted house, every abandoned hospital, every storm drain to have clasped a body like a girl's final prayer, we sieved through them all.
♥ We had dated-if you could call it that. Eight weeks, no chemistry, not even a kiss, and had we been older, our confidence less flimsy, less dependent on the perceived temperature of our reputations, we'd have known to end it sooner. Something came out of that, at least: a friendship. Guilt-bruised, gestated in the shambles of a stillborn romance. But a friendship nonetheless.
♥ A long year spent making acquaintances with the demons inside you, each new day a fresh covenant. It does things to you. More specifically, it undoes things inside you. To have to barter for the bravery to go outside, pick up the phone, spend ten minutes assured in the upward trajectory of your recovery: that the appointments are enough, that you can be enough, that one day, this will be enough to make things okay again. All those things change you.
♥ Despite everything, I was warming to their enthusiasm, partially because it was so much easier to just go along with it, less lonely too. Media's all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we're all just sheep.
♥ Silence placed itself to rest along the house and upon our tongues.
♥ I stared at the skins of woven straw thatching the floors, shuddered despite myself. I was abruptly dumbstruck by a profound curiosity.
How many dead and dismembered women laid folded in these walls and under these floors, in the rafters that ribbed the ceiling and along those broad steps, barely visible in the murk?
Tradition insists the offerings be buried alive, able to breathe and bargain through the process, their funerary garments debased by shit, piss, and whatever other fluids we extrude on the cusp of death. I couldn't shake the idea of an eminently practical family, one that understood that bone won't rot where wood might, ordering their workers to stack girls like bricks. Arms here, legs there, a vein of skulls wefted into the manor's framing, insurance against a time when traditional architecture might fail. Might as well. They were here for the long haul. One day, these doors would open and wedding guests would pour through and there would be a marriage, come the cataclysm or modern civilization.
The house would wait forever until it happened.
One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones.
All for one girl as she waited and waited.
Alone in the dirt and the dark.
♥ I glanced over, breathing easy again, to see Faiz and Talia bent together like congregants, a steeple made of their bodies, foreheads touching. It was impossible to miss the cue.
Exit, stage anywhere.
♥ "..I don't already know the right things to say. I mean, I'm okay at some things, but-"
Like women, I thought. Like being a star, being loved, being hungered for. Phillip excelled at inciting want, particularly the kind that tottered on the border of worship. Small wonder he was so inept at compassion sometimes. Every religion is a one-way relationship.
♥ "You wound me."
"Your ego wounds you. I was just its instrument."
And he laughed then. Like it didn't matter, like it couldn't matter, not for him, not ever, not when so much of the world waited, eager, to tithe him everything for a kiss. Phillip wouldn't pauper himself with a grudge, not with the blessed largesse of his straight, white, rich-boy life.
♥ A whisper, so quiet the cerebellum wouldn't acknowledge its receipt. The words were drowned by the reverb of Faiz's voice calling, an afterimage, an impression of teeth on skin. We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride downing on soil.
♥ An image bled into place. If Phillip's ghost was real, she would be enamel and ink and a birdcage body, its bones like filigree or fish spines, barely enough to cup its impatient heart. A girl in her bridal whites, jaw sharp as a promise. Her kisses close-lipped, without tongue or heat. Like a benediction or a prayer or an ending.
And her mouth, of course, from its teeth through to the tunnel of its throat: black.
♥ Silence leaned into us, a conspiring friend. I looked up at Phillip. He stood stooped with two fists balled-up at his sides, teeth gritted, breath bleeding in trails.
♥ A female voice, solicitous and sweet. Distantly, the brain stem screeched, stress hormones wailing at my motor system, demanding I run, run now, escape into the sanctuary of multiplicity, disappear into the waiting herds, do anything so long as I remove myself from probable harm, anything just go, go now.
But my limbs would not concede to their urging.
♥ "What'd you find?" The corridor behind her peeled away into a hell of opened doors, closing into a deep indigo murk. Something was wrong. Somewhere, choking on alcohol and stress hormones, there was a piece of me that knew why.
♥ "Because you were so unhappy."
"Is that why you didn't visit me either? Didn't reach out?" The words swayed like a body on a rope, finally slack. Emotional distance reframing that previous incarnation as a stranger, without body or nuance, a monochrome despair decanted into the slumped mouth, a six-month affair with cigarettes and self-loathing.
♥ She hid nothing this time, the thing beneath Talia's veil. My girl from the mirror. There wasn't a face to remember because there wasn't a face to find. Black hair tendriled across contourless meat, no features to be seen. Only suggestions. Only smooth flesh and that grinning mouth, those red lips stretched as far as they'd go, black teeth, and the smell of ink. As I gawked, Talia's kimono bled itself of color, pinks and golds runneling from every layer, pouring into the dust at her feet so all that was left was white, the color of expensive chalk and bone left to cook in the sun.
The ohaguro-bettari began to laugh before any of us could think to scream.
♥ "And if you two start fighting, who the fuck is going to do the rescuing? Isn't that your job? You're the all-star quarterback, aren't you? The hero? You're supposed to-"
"Die," Lin whispered.
But Phillips seemed mesmerized, and he gazed at me, mouth slack. I thought of new corpses lying quietly in shallow pools, still lukewarm to the touch, eyes and mouth open as though wedged open with wonder. But slowly, Phillip's tepid stare came alive as I continued to murmur, Scheherazade-like, about everything and nothing, the yokai settling into odalisque poses, an eye-wateirng collage.
♥ Read a hundred books on horror, and you'll find that every last one possesses at least one mention of someone's eyes gone strange, unfocused and unsettling to witness. I'd always thought it sounded kitschy, hammy, a lazy trope implanted into the creative subconscious by sub-par mentors, pure Hollywood dross. But the look tenanting Faiz's eyes remedied those preconceptions. All the lights were on, and all the ghosts were home too. It wasn't the face of a killer, or the face of a suicide, but someone too exhausted to be either, which was somehow all the worse. When you're tired enough, you'll do anything for sleep.
♥ Noting my attention, Lin flicked his gaze up, wrote a circle in the air with a trembling finger, mouthed the word crazy. I couldn't tell who he meant. Faiz or him or me or the entirety of our codependent coven, our audience besides, the blind damning the blind, a theatre of dead fools. I swallowed vomit, thin as gruel and warm.
♥ "The fuck do you think you're doing?" Like hell I was going to stand down for an ego swollen as an alcoholic's liver, bruised black, bleeding warm pus and grief. Mourning's got a way of making men out of mice, I tell you.
♥ This is the problem with horror movies:
Everyone knows what's coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn't mean that you can, stop.
♥ If I was a betting woman, I'd have put money on Faiz being the one to break the stalemate. I'd have gambled on his idiocy. Grief makes us worse people.
♥ His voice was a hush, full of shame for the sin he'd committed against better judgement. Men like Phillip don't punch people. Except when they do.
♥ Phillip's eyes were rolled up to the whites and he stank of piss. I didn't know someone else's pain could have a texture, a bite, a gelatinousness you could hold in your teeth, but I could almost gnaw on Phillip's dying.
♥ "I didn't mean to."
"I know," I said, all the while thinking you're lying, you're lying, you're lying. A decade of friendship teaches you a lot of things: the tics that separate I'm sorry and I'm sorry you caught me, that hangdog expression that is really code for when the other person's expecting you to fix their mess.
I wondered what they saw in my face.
♥ Compassion, like everything else, can be worn dull by rough use.
♥ There was nothing to find.
There was nothing found.
And all at once, it was over.
Phillip stopped being Phillip.
He became instead a closed casket and terse conversations, a house with every curtain drawn shut.