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After the bureaucracy was all sorted out and Pandora had taken the place of the Baskervilles as the guardian and arbiter of the land of the dead, Jack personally installed Glen Baskerville’s head as a trophy in the main hall of the building. He would have put it in his office—he had his own office now, how exciting!—but in the privacy behind closed doors Glen bit, and Jack had no desire to deal with that, now or ever. He had found that he could not abide the feeling of teeth on his skin, these days; the discomfort was astounding, and he thought Glen knew it, because he bit Jack whenever he could, unless there were people watching. How cruel of him; but then again, Glen had become very cruel of late, he’d stopped Jack from bringing the world of the living to Lacie in the land of the dead, and he had not shared Lacie’s wishes even though he’d known them, and he had pretended to be dead until Jack kissed him the night after Sablier fell into the Abyss, and then he bit Jack’s tongue, hard—not hard enough to draw blood, thank goodness, because losing both an ear and a tongue in the same day would be inconvenient, even for Jack.
It was funny, really. Glen’s head had been detached from the rest of his body; he had no breath to speak and no limbs to move and yet, for the first time ever, Glen was fighting back against him, was rejecting him. It was hilarious. Glen couldn’t resist hardly at all, and yet—for the first time since meeting him, Glen was not trying to dig out whatever scraps of the “real Jack” still existed in his hollow heart but was rather trying to push him away. Or, Jack thought Glen was trying to push him away. The man had only his head now, after all; it wasn’t like he could communicate any. Jack was even purposefully forgetting how to lipread, all for him. All so that Glen could be alone, isolated, a head only, up on the wall, watching forever as all that he had lived for was trampled and replaced and degraded.
He made such a nice trophy, too. Jack had had a marble pedestal custom-made just for him, at just the perfect height to lean over and kiss—because Glen hated to be kissed now, certainly not because Jack enjoyed this, enjoyed pressing his open mouth to Glen’s cold lips and exploring his throat with his tongue, now that Glen wanted to resist him but could not. He had placed a velvet cushion on the pedestal, blood red with a real gold trim, because Jack was a hero now and he could do that—he didn’t even have to pay the craftsman.
Jack personally had glued Glen’s head to the cushion after that, using only the finest and strongest superglue; as Glen’s best friend, it was his right, and anyway if he had someone else do it he would have to find a way to explain why the head still leaked fresh blood along the bottom of the neck. A good thing the velvet was red—the blood wouldn’t show, once Jack was done. To ensure this too he ran his finger along the weeping edges of the glued neck and sucked the blood off of it like a child at its mother’s teat; Glen’s eyes stared hard off into the middle distance, jaw clenched, and Jack thought that he was probably a bite risk right now but took his chin and forced his mouth open and put his teeth inside of Glen’s lips and tried to draw out Glen’s tongue with his own tongue anyway. It was flaccid, cold, and limp; Jack knew this trick, but he let himself fall for it anyway. He wrapped his own tongue around Glen’s and pulled it back towards his own mouth, and Glen’s teeth came down sharp and harsh on Jack’s lower lip and the base of his tongue. Jack thought that Glen wanted a reaction out of him, so he held still; then he thought that Glen wanted to keep biting him, and so he jerked his head away, ended up pulling Glen’s head and the attached pillow all the way off the pedestal, at which point gravity took over and Glen’s head fell from Jack’s mouth and hit the ground, where it bounced and cracked and bled some more.
Jack stared wildly around him; nobody seemed to have seen, which was a relief; he picked up Glen’s head by the hair and licked the blood off of his face before arranging him neatly on the pedestal once more. There: he was perfect. Silent, unmoving—unable to move, or speak, or resist. Jack smiled, a smile just for Glen, and then leaned forward and kissed him again, this time a simple press of lips on lips, leaving no opportunity for Glen to bite. It was nice, like kissing a cold leather doll; he ran his tongue along Glen’s silenced lips as a goodbye-for-now and then straightened up once more.
“You know, I really do like you so much better like this, Glen!” he said cheerily, beaming down at his old friend. “You were quiet before, too, but this is much nicer…you’re not looking at me anymore.”
He turned on his heel and headed out back towards his office; a few steps in, he locked eyes with Arthur Barma, who was standing stock-still and staring in the direction of Glen’s severed head in abject horror. So he had seen it all? —Well, that was hardly Jack’s problem.
“Don’t worry!” he said cheerfully as he passed Arthur, who jumped at the noise. “He’s not dead, so it’s fine.”
“Not…dead…?” echoed Arthur—annoying, but he always had been slow.
“He bites when you put your tongue in his mouth,” said Jack. “Why don’t you give it a go? —For the sake of your dear sister, who isn’t with us anymore but would have so loved this opportunity.”
Arthur flinched at the mention of Miranda—dearly departed if she was lucky, suffering with the Ill Omens for eternity if she was not—and Jack took the opportunity to brush past him, not looking back, until he reached the corner and stood there just out of sight, waiting. Arthur never had refused him before; certainly, Jack believed, he would not do so now.
He was right: cautiously Arthur crept towards the pedestal bearing Glen’s head and stood over it for a moment, shaking; then he leant down towards it as though presenting his head to a guillotine, pressed his mouth to Glen’s mouth, pulled his head away, stumbled to the wall and vomited all over himself three times.
“That wasn’t alive…” he mumbled. “That thing wasn’t alive at all…”
So Glen had decided to mess with Jack by pretending to be a real corpse, had he? Well, the joke was on him: if you were a hero, nobody cared if you were a necrophiliac. They all worshipped you anyway. Maybe people would even follow his and Arthur’s example, and then what would Glen do? He would be being kissed by strangers who hated him all the time. He would despise it and he would have done it to himself, all because he didn’t bite poor Arthur. How entertaining!
Leaving Glen to his misery, Jack continued down the hallway, whistling a cheery little tune. Today was a good day; tomorrow would be even better. After all, Glen couldn’t get away ever again, and Lacie was somewhere Jack could find her again—she already had found him once—she would do it again, too, or maybe he would find her, once the scab where his ear had been faded into toothmarked scars. Not before that—he couldn’t, he was too busy, and anyway the adrenaline that coursed through his veins was too much. He had had no idea, before, that excitement felt like nausea, like his heartbeat in his throat, like lead in his veins; he did not want to keep feeling it, and yet he felt himself unable to move towards the object of his excitement. Probably this was because it was so fun to kiss Glen like this; it would be much harder to do in front of his sister. Jack would not want her to see him kissing anyone else, and Glen’s tongue was so cold and so limp, and his mouth tasted like blood and like death, always. Other than the biting—it was wonderful to kiss. Jack would do it again, he knew he would, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and he knew that Glen would never get away.