12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 7, “Clickbait”
The video sprung into public consciousness, thrown into the collective memescape, as Heidegger might say. We speculated, of course: a studio or artist leak, a subtle spread via influencers. No one took credit. It posted, and we seemed to find it, those of us meant to. Its lack of origin granted it more than mystique; it framed the film with an aura of pristine, precious secrecy, worth more than gold in a transparent age.
No one can explain how we found it. The stories on the comment boards and fan pages all run about the same; we discovered it in listless, anxious scrolling through the media’s terror dujour. We saw the link and clicked it. Why? No answer. Nothing noteworthy about the thumbnail image (a simple black box resembling a failure to load) or its page placement. Always some vague text accompanying the link; standard buzz boilerplate like “You have to see this!” “This video is what INSERT AUTHORITY FIGURE doesn’t want you to see!” But we believed the trite words, when we believed in so little. We believed as frightened children in dark bedrooms cling to the slight frame of light haloing a hallway door. Without a choice.
Click. Play.
The video opens on black, an empty screen. No fade, just a jumpcut to a grey-green blur, a sick bruise on aluminosilicate screens. The familiar seesaw of resolution and blur common to a consumer grade camera, then sharp focus on terror embodied. The blur now a column of impossible, monstrous flesh, suckered tentacles snaking around asymmetric eyes blinking in arrhythmic chaos. The lens pulls back, revealing the columns turning and twisting in and on themselves. Zoom out, out, out until miniscule trees and a beige, rocky beach slip into the bottom of the frame, counterpoint to the creature, its scale comparable to the Manhattan cityscape devouring the sky.
Our stomachs churned and clenched, our throats tightened and twisted. Some cried, hyperventilated, shook as if in fever. A friend from Argentina said, “I felt it coming. The worst panic attack of my life. But it was real now, more than a physiological trick. I thought it would kill me. I wanted it to. It would be over, then.”
And then, the note. No noticeable cut of our tension, just its simple extraction. Swift, sure and precise, the note removed our fear of the thing. In the absence of terror, a hunger for confirmation that someone, or something, could offer such sanctuary. The notes continued, sung, as the camera turned, her face replacing the monster.
“Speechless, and even a word describing no words feels understated,” wrote Nick Cave in his Red Hand Files newsletter. “No one wanted to smear her with language, flick words at her like flies. She simply existed, the antithesis of the other.”
A grand description of no description. Antithesis: we knew it in the time it took for the brain to deliver the image. It came labeled and wrapped, the information front-loaded. We knew everything about her and nothing, as close to faith as faithless converts could come. She glowed, a prismatic, kaleidoscoping Kirlian trace swirling along her frame, shifting and surging as she sang, then falling back to a dim glow, a tide of her.
The lens turns back to the monster, its eyes closing, the tentacles and appendages slowing, falling still, the way limbs of the sleeping lose their tensile readiness.
An eldritch lullaby. A torch song for absolute dark.
The camera turns back to her, and, for the first time, she gazes at the lens. Her eyes live in screens, meeting ours, drawing them to her as impossible harmonies and undiscovered octaves fall from her lips.
I’m here. We feel this. So are you. Awareness of heartbeats and breath and air on skin, spines aligned with mattresses and chairs, the sensed vibrations of buses, cars, airplanes, offices and homes. All the places we could be and had been accreting in the moment of are. We longed to touch her, to hold her, the mutual confirmation of existence, of presence. Before, we lived in absence, a truth bitten off the end of our tongues.
She smirks.
The song turns, the sweetness burning into the smoke cadence of a battle hymn. Her voice plateaus and dives, switching registers with a fencer’s speed, the notes sharp and long punctuations, parries and thrusts. She sings violence and victory, a symphony of firebomb breath, igniting in our ears.
The camera turns again, one of the monstrous eyes wide, shot with blood and fear.
Her again, a shot from the shoulders up, her gaze resolute, her grin fixed. They are coming. But we are here.
The song stops. The screen goes black.
Jumpcut to sunlight dappling children on a beach A trio, toddlers dressed in bright swimwear, their chubby limps caked with drying sand as they lift wet scoopfuls of it with their plastic shovels, burying a wooden idol of the thing that loomed over the beach . It vanishes slow beneath clumps of the shore, the thick earth falling on its ridiculous shape. As they play at work, the children sing a song:
Dumb, dumb Dagon and his dank sea home,
Swim away, swim away, old one,
The tide is out, your time is done.
A figure in the distance. Her. We know this, even as the camera zooms. Before it captures her, she turns, walks forward, arms outstretched, head tipped backward to the light. Beneath the children’s song, we hear a melodic, rich laugh.
She won’t turn back. She knows where Orpheus failed. Roads out of the underworld don’t accept timorous, uncertain steps. You march out of hell, the grandmaster of your own joyful, blasphemous parade.
Blackout. Then, an elegant script fades in: “Yours, Hypnos.”
Futile, this. You cannot know without seeing. But if it finds you, if you are meant to see, then you will grasp it in abject despair and unyielding hope, as it offers both in turn. You will understand.
They are coming. But we are here. She is with us. Don’t look away. Press play.
12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 6, “A Brief Collection of My Favorite Air BnB Reviews”
Key House, Lovecraft, MA
“I don’t get it.”
Me, my girlfriend and her seven year old stayed at Key House over Labor Day weekend. Beautiful views greeted us from the long driveway, but the house seemed to have an inordinate number of locked interior doors. Look, if you don’t want rando guests finding your sex dungeon, cool, but put up a sign or something explaning the situation, you know? Aside from some odd whispering noises in the caves down by the beach, my girl and I loved the place, but the seven year old went catatonic on Sunday afternoon and we had to take him to a doctor. Bummer, but the kid’s weird anyway. I did have repetitive dreams about a hottie stuck in a well. Could be mold in the walls? Maybe not a great place for the family.
The Overlook, Rocky Mountains, Colorado
“It’s a hotel.”
First of all, I hate when a hotel calls themselves an Air BnB just to market rooms; I’m looking for personal touches in my stay and a sense of home, not a Holiday Inn. Anyhow, here’re the bullet points:
Under no circumstances is it okay for staff to tell children they have psychic powers. We are raising our son to be rational, thank you. The earth’s not flat, your kid isn’t psychic. Moving on.
While the bleeding elevator feature was interesting, it cannot be sanitary and also did not fit the holiday season.
Children should not be allowed to wander the halls at all hours regardless of their matching clothing.
I am sorry your mother has dementia and bedsores, but she does not belong in our bathtub.
If a furry wants to blow you, please shut the door of your goddamn room.
This is Colorado. There should be microbrews on offer.
Lastly, that hedge maze is a huge waste of resources. Skip this one.
Knowby Cabin, Morristown, Tennessee
“This hellhole can swallow my ass.”
This place is more or less a living reminder why tape should remain a dead medium. After five minutes of nutty chanting on an old reel to reel, the chained up basement door (yeah, really) started rattling like a motherfucker and some deranged basement woman started yelling about how she was going to swallow our souls. Then, my fiancee’s girlfriend got a full hashtage Me Too from a rhododendron bush and I couldn’t even find a fucking chainsaw to cut the bastard out of the ground. Oh, and bring your own books because the ones you find here are bound in human skin. Last but not least, souls are the only thing getting swallowed around here because there isn’t even a goddamn Winn Dixie for more than one-hundred miles. Just go camping in Yellowstone.
The Witch House, Providence, R.I.
“Uncanny Valley Rats.”
At first, I was concerned about some of the prior reviews for this distinctly charmless Victorian, but its proximity to my conference on typesetting anxieties in early Gutenberg press editions at the nearby college convinced me to book the place. The stares and whispers from the neighbors as I unlocked the door had me questioning whether Rhode Island has earned its progessive laurels, and I was less than enthused to find my bag rolling across the floor of its own accord; apparently, the architect considered themselves some sort of fusion between Ptolemy and Hunter Thompson when it came to assigning angles to the overall design. Those things aside, I loved it. I was surprised by the rat with a human face named Brown Jenkins (I thought it was a Ratatouille tie-in at first), but he had some fabulous insights on Eliphas Levi’s earlier works and recommended a lovely brunch spot nearby. Other reviews complained about weird dreams, but a few Xanax and a Manhattan and I slept like I’d fallen in an abyss. I’d stay again; just make sure you have plans to get you out of the house now and then.
Thornfield Hall, Derbyshire, England
“Just no.”
The owner’s an arrogant prick named Rochester and he’s got a woman locked up in the attic. Like I need to spend the night in someone’s remake of 9 ½ Weeks. Hard pass.
House of 1000 Corpses, United States
“Light on corpses, high on cliches.”
I’m all for themed resorts, but if you claim to be offering 1000 corpses, I want to see 1000 corpses. Also, the trope of inbred people in the American backwoods has been played out; inbreeding usually results in albinism or blood diseases, not murderous insanity. And the girl with the Shirly Temple voice and Daisy Dukes is annoying AF. Captain Spaulding’s museum was fun, though. Lots of selfie opportunities. Overall, just meh, IMHO.
The Vallens Residence, Lumberton, NC
“Weird neighbors.”
The house had a cool 1950s throwback vibe (apparently the owner is a lounge singer or something) and we appreciated the spacious closets. I was less than enthused when a neighbor, (Frank something or other) showed up with a tank of amyl nitrate looking for erotic infantilization, though. Nice place overall. Good coffee. My wife dug the hot Canadian dude living on the block.
The Navidson House, Virginia
“The Leaves are Falling.”
My husband went into what we assumed was a linen closet to find towels. My Fitbit said I walked five miles in the closet looking for him before I turned around. My husband is gone. Hipsters are writing essays about him. I can say no more due to a pending lawsuit with Air BnB.
House of Usher, Maryland
“Sibling and construction issues.”
This place could use a home makeover show like you wouldn’t believe, and best of luck getting the clinically depressed homeowner to leave you alone. If he’s not begging you to read him a story he rambles about his sister who, it is 100 percent clear, he was, or was wanting to, fuck. Major dry rot problems as well, and the foundation is clearly damaged. I didn’t see a single radon detector in the house. It’s going to cave in on some poor fucker some day. Don’t let it be you.
221B Baker Street, London
“Hidden Gem.”
At first, my partner and I worried about staying in a shared home, but at the price, we couldn’t do better. Turned out the downstairs lady was a friendly English widower, and she gave us a basket of biscuits and tea as well as the key for the upstairs “flat” (so quaint). We felt reassured and then we saw the decor: straight up My Favorite Murder Steampunk cosplay. I wanted to leave but then we found...get this...ENOUGH COKE AND HEROIN TO KILL MILES DAVIS!!!! Best week ever. Have you ever split an eight ball and then hit The British Museum? It saved our marriage.
12 Stories, 1 Year; Story 5, “Ink and Quill”
Long ago, a kingdom faded as a mirage at twilight. The rush of time eroded its tower, temples, markets and necropolises to words, which, freed of their physical mooring, swept across history, seeking the ears and eyes of travelers to take root in their imaginations. In the palimpset of the mind, a verdant field of language, the lost kingdom rises and flourishes again and again; such are the miracles of stories and names, be they praised.
In this kingdom lived a woman who devoted herself to words. Not an uncommon calling, as scribes, storytellers and liars abound, but words solely of themselves offered her little interest in their abstractions and appeals. Instead, she adored the intricacies of their production, the lines, curves and gestures that shaped the actors on their vellum stage, the specific pressures on the pen offering nuance and character to banal, repetitive symbols. This woman, of incredible talent and deliberation, chose the art of calligraphy as her own. She excelled beyond any who had come before, and almost all who have and may still come after.
She devoted herself to calligraphy with such singular focus that those around her simply referred to her as Ink, at first in humor and then as a matter of practice as no one could recall her given name. Ink shrugged her birth name from her shoulders and donned the name of her craft in its place, and as she adopted the name, so too did her art adopt her as its undisputed master, as a mastiff adopts the grand hunter. As Ink and calligraphy coalesced and combined, they transcended the often blurred boundary of practice and practitioner and became greater than either.
Her talents grew to such impossible height that Ink, in her twentieth year, produced script of such majestic beauty that it exceeded the boundaries of the page to work upon the firmament itself. When Ink applied her talents, the written word in its true meaning and nature manifested in the world.
It started with simple things, unnoticed magics. An invitation to a party written by Ink ensured excitement in the days leading to the event and wonderful, warm and memorable festivals. A note of sympathy written with the master’s pen brought true warmth and comfort to the bereaved, as the alignments of the letters on the page spoke of a deeper order and meaning to the inevitable suffering of a human heart. Love letters (Ink adored writing such missives) lingered in the thoughts and senses of the beloved as a rich perfume, steering hands and lips with the deepest longing. These unpretentious wonders began to accrete in the minds of those who experienced them, and the people of the village began to understand Ink’s power. Soon, they recognized her as a gift from the heavens who dwelt among them, smiling away in the market as she gathered her day’s food and greeted her neighbors.
Once those of the village realized Ink’s gift (and we shall not call it divine, as we have no evidence it came from any god beyond talent, dedication and effort), they felt ever dearer warmth toward the calligrapher. Where fools might have sought to exploit her talents to increase their coffers, bolster their crops or cheat their fates, the people of the village understood demands would sully the magic of her works, and so they only approached Ink in vital circumstances, and with the understanding that she, in the act of writing, exercised no judgement and faculty but her own and that of nature. And this was enough for the people of the village, for Ink, to their even greater fortune, possessed a kind and beautiful heart.
When a long monsoon season lifted the flood waters beyond the river banks, washing the low valleys and inching their way towards outlying homes, the elders approached Ink for help. She sat down atop the highest hill in the village with her brush and scroll and wrote of the sun and its warmth, her pen light and precise, the lines swift and warm. The rains broke in hours, and two full weeks of bright sky greeted the village.
When a desperate hunter from the nearby mountain stumbled into the village, blisters of pox screaming from his fevered skin, the villagers did not panic, but asked Ink to produce amulets for the people and the hunter. She inscribed “health” on a series of small scrolls, each etched with robust and flawless lettering, and the villagers hung them from their doors or over their beds. Within two weeks, the hunter returned to the forest, and pox darkened not a single doorstep in the village.
We could fill page upon page with such stories, because, as Ink aged, her devotion for her art and her village and its people became indistinguishable in her eyes. If her work pleased her, it pleased the people, and so attention and affection for one extended to all. This wholeness suited Ink and Ink suited such wholeness, and all found fortune, words be praised.
While Ink found ease in writing of the weather and the crops and the well-being of her neighbors, she found a stronger vocation in the writing of names, for names, people once believed, defined the named; the style of writing, Ink’s specialty, offered further definition and guidance. For this reason, it became a local custom, upon the birth of a child but before the public announcement of its moniker, to invite the renowned calligrapher for dinner and to meet the child. At the end of the visit, with bellies full and hearts merry, Ink wrote the child’s name as a gift, a forecast of their future.
If the letters of the name seemed elegant and expressive, the parents could expect a child with tender sensibilities and grace. If Ink wrote in blocky, thick script, they could expect a child of good health and great strength. If the letters slashed across the page, a child of quick wit, sharp tongue and swift action entered the world. If the letters seemed almost invisible on the page, little more than ethereal scratches, the child may well possess the gifts of a mystic or sorcerer.
A cynic, of course, might ask if a parent disgruntled and displeased by Ink’s interpretation would rebuke the calligrapher, but no such questions arose. If a parent carried ire, they knew better than to express it to Ink, for she explained to her neighbors, upon the inception of the naming custom, that she would impart no impression of her own, no artistic license, in the naming of children, but rather would write by instinct, allowing the nature of the child and the will of the world to move and guide her pen.
On rare occasions, a family would invite Ink for the celebratory meal and, upon its end, simply ask her to impart a blessing on the child and leave with her pen dry and her papers untouched. Ink always met such requests with a thankful smile to the parents and a kiss and cuddle for the babe, as she understood all too well the weight of knowing one’s nature. Even when she left without writing a word, she relished the chance to share in the good fortune of her neighbors and to spend time with an infant, for Ink adored children.
In her thirty-third winter, the people of the village noticed a change in Ink. She wrote with less frequency and with greater haste, the neatness and precision of her hand still greater than that of a master, but sloppy in comparison to her work at the height of her passion and dedication. More and more people began to politely refuse Ink’s namings, and when sickness fell upon them, they chose to let nature take its course unless the situation grew dire.
Ink understood their reservations, and condemned her failings, as she could not understand her own disinterest and unhappiness. One evening, after naming the local cobbler’s new daughter (fine, stout letters, a strong-hearted woman in the making), headed into the night with her lantern pointed toward home, Ink stood in the darkness with no one as, behind doors and shutters all around her, people shared a hearth with their loved ones. While Ink loved the village and the village loved her, such love could not address the desire Ink found within herself to make her own family, to name her own children.
But Ink, having spent so many years in the pursuit of her art, knew little of love and romance, and so she went to the local matchmaker. The matchmaker listened carefully to Ink’s story, and, once the calligrapher’s tale ceased, the matchmaker took Ink in her wrinkled arms and pulled her close.
“Child,” the matchmaker said, “there is no one in this village I would pair you with. Though you may speak for the world, I hear all hearts, and your heart beats for one far, far away.”
Ink began to cry, but the matchmaker hushed her, wiping away the tears with a silk scarf, a gift from a satisfied groom.
“While I can’t help you, I have no doubt you can help yourself, so here is what you need to do.” And the matchmaker described a ritual, which Ink committed to memory.
One morning a month hence, when the last light of the love planet faded from the sky with the rising sun, Ink sat on the shore of the lake outside of the village and thought about family, longing, desire, romance, children and hearth. And then she wrote four immutable letters on her finest vellum with her heart full of these things, allowing desire to guide her craft. The task finished, she allowed the ink to dry in the rising sun and sat vigil until sunset, watching the sky in the reflection of the still water. Once the sun slipped below the ridge, she burned the paper to ash and scattered the remains to the night breeze, beseeching the wind to seek out her love.
In the days following, Ink returned to her cheerful, dedicated self, and the villagers again entrusted her with their most important words and names. But in the evenings, her eyes turned toward the horizon as she kept vigil of the road leading into town, imagining her lover’s feet somewhere along its winding, dusty miles.
A month before the winter set in, at the time of harvest, a wandering scholar arrived in the village, his pack laden with powders, unguents and books from foreign lands. He knew of magics and cures from realms far beyond, and when he heard the tale of Ink from the villagers at the inn, he insisted on meeting the famed artist.
When he knocked on her door, she invited him inside, suspecting his purpose, and it became apparent, within a few hours of laughter and tales and silences that filled the space with the heat of fire, the wandering scholar had, at last, found a home and Ink’s magic had, as she trusted, brought her the first part of her dream. Where she loved the shape of written word, he loved the nuances and craft of meaning, and through the other each began to love words with greater depth than either imagined possible. And so, as winter dug its heels into the village, snow blanketing its roofs, Ink and the scholar warmed one another, and when the Spring came, the village anticipated many naming ceremonies, including one Ink would both host and attend for she expected a child.
The days grew longer as summer rose and, almost a year to the day of the scholar’s arrival, Ink gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Quill in hope the girl would possess her parents shared love of words in both meaning and shape.
From her first days, Quill did not disappoint either the calligrapher or the scholar. As an infant, she would lay beside her mother in silence, lulled by the scratching of the pen on the page. As a toddler, she coated her fingers in liquid black, swirling the tips on the page in imitation of her mother, whom watched her with joy. As for her father, Quill’s heart and mind grew so full on his tales and explanations that, before she could even read them herself, she had begun to tell her parents stories in the evening, entertaining them with endless variations and twists on all she had learned at her father’s knee.
In Quill’s fourth year, Ink took a scroll and wrote the name of her daughter, her husband and herself along with the word “Home”. In each subtle nuance of the letters, she could see echoes of all three, united in love. That same day, she wrote “Thankful” on her finest vellum and buried it in the earth near the river while her husband and daughter swam beneath the sun.
*
So went life in the village, but the village existed within a kingdom, and only a fool would believe that word of Ink’s gift could remain hemmed within small confines. Perhaps sorcerers saw the calligrapher and her impossible talent within their reflecting mirrors and globes, or perhaps the spirits whispered of her in powerful ears. Maybe a wanderer who passed through the village traded tales of magic for reduced bed rates and heartier meals. Regardless of how the rumors spread, spread they did, until they found the ear of The Emperor.
The Emperor learned of Ink and the village ritual of naming at a fortunate time, as he and his wife anticipated the birth of their first child (a son, The Emperor prayed). When The Emperor heard tale of the calligrapher, he sent his fastest emissary to the village to demand she conduct a naming ritual for the royal bable, with all the ceremony and pomp of the royal court. But the emissary, in fear and shame, returned to the castle gates alone, an elegantly crafted note in hand.
The note explained that Ink could not, she regretted, attend the court, as she, too, anticipated the birth of her first child (the aforementioned Quill). However, she invited The Emperor and The Empress to visit them at their home, where she would happily record the name of their newborn.
The Emperor fumed, but The Empress, sympathetic to Ink’s condition, suggested a visit to the village would not only allow for the mystical consecration of their child, but also afford the royals an opportunity to tour their kingdom and greet its people, introducing them to the newest branch of the royal line. This placated The Emperor, who relished few things more than adoration.
The Empress gave birth to a son under favorable stars. The child, in its first hours, did not cry, but simply watched the world around him, as if gathering the empire he would inherit in the years to come. Though the royal doctor recommended the child remain within the confines of the castle for at least four months, the boy took to horseback and the road with the zeal of a conqueror, eyes wide and open to the people and places beyond the windows of the Royal Carriage.
In time, the road carried them to the village where Ink resided, and they slipped in under the cover of night, tired of the fanfare greeting them at each and every stop along the road. In their travels, The Emperor and Empress grew aware of how much the people of their kingdom struggled and labored to provide for their families, and though the land knew much bounty, it came at a dear price to those who tended it. And if this was the intention of Ink and her scholar all along, the land was better for their brilliant scheme in coming years.
When The Emperor and Empress and prince met Ink and her scholar and the newborn Quill, they did so as family, and The Emperor and Empress savored the simple joys of the calligrapher’s home while the children lay beside one another in the fire light.
After dinner, Ink gathered her finest pens, sharpest hues and flattened a smooth sheet of vellum for the Prince’s naming. With the royal child before her, asleep next to her own daughter, she asked The Empress for the boy’s name. The Empress whispered it into the calligrapher’s ear. Ink smiled, nodded, and without ceremony or hesitation, certain in her action and trusting fate, she wrote the name of the boy. His parents chose Rule, as they hoped he would do so with decency, honor and majesty.
When Ink finished, she presented the scroll to The Emperor, awaiting his response. The aged monarch looked over her work and smiled, pleased by the subtle majesty in the script, the slight flourishes and precise, defined lines speaking to a compelling blend of elegance and determination.
“He will be a great man,” The Emperor said, looking at Ink for confirmation of this impression. The calligrapher smiled, and offered a slight nod. She saw more than that in the letters, of course, but such things seemed uncertain and distant, not worth mentioning to the clearly satisfied Royals. Ink kept her counsel as the four adults shared a fine and expensive bottle of wine before they went to sleep.
In the morning, the villagers noted the carriage and royal guard, and the party they planned for their monarchs commenced in earnest. At the height of the festivities, The Emperor held Rule above his head and introduced the boy to his future subjects and, because of the good deed done for him by Ink, he exempted the village from taxes for the next ten harvests, rewarding them with leisure and abundance. This not only endeared the villagers to their ruler but deepened their love for Ink, and for the next ten years they thanked her for each extra morsel on their plates and extra coin in their purses.
In the morning, The Emperor, Empress and Rule boarded their carriage and continued their journey. Life in the village went on in quiet contentment, which suited Ink far more than any grand court or gilded throne ever could.
*
As she aged, Quill began, in her own precocious fashion, to demonstrate gifts similar to those of her mother, but varied. Whereas Ink’s calligraphy captured the nature of the things named and manifested these traits, the inflections of Quill’s pens shaped them, shifting them. If Quill wrote “harvest” in a weak, quavering script, the crops in question grew, but sickly and slow, blooming with rot and decay. If she gifted the word “warmth” with a light, gentle touch, the warmth would prove near imperceptible, a warm breeze in a fall cold. One morning, after the neighbor’s dog barked through the night, Quill slashed the name of the beast on the floor of her room with paint, and the dog choked to death on a bone before sunset.
Her father discovered the writing, and when he showed it to Ink, the mother knew the time had come to speak to her daughter of responsibility. She gathered up all the pens and brushes and inks and paints in the house, locked them in the shed, and set out for the mountains with her daughter, carrying only clothing, a small supply of food and her own calligrapher’s tools.
On the walk to the Traveler’s Home, an unowned temple for prayer, reflection and respite near the mountain’s middle pass, Quill remained quiet, cataloguing the animals and plants and trees and flowers they passed. She traced the lines of rock formations and clouds, grasping at what words they might form. Ink watched her daughter with an admixture of joy and fear, for she understood what wonders Quill might know in her life and bring to others, but what terror she could also inscribe upon a soul, should she choose. Perhaps, in this, Ink shared the hearts of all parents attempting to scry the future of their child, for incredible hearts beat in practical chests.
When they arrived at the Traveler’s Home, Ink sent Quill to gather firewood while she prepared the space, which, as she suspected, sat empty at this time of year, as the snow high in the mountains blocked all roads and paths. When Quill returned with enough fallen sticks and logs chopped by pastl occupants, Ink prepared the fire and set a kettle of tea to boil.
“Did you know what writing the name of the dog would do to it?” Ink asked the girl, because she knew better than to condescend to her daughter, especially on a matter of such importance.
Quill nodded. “I was angry.”
“Of that, there is no doubt,” Ink said. “And I was angry at the dog, too. As was your father and the other neighbors and perhaps even the dog’s owner,” Ink said. “But does that mean what happened to the dog was right?”
Quill shook her head, lowering her gaze. Ink lifted her daughter’s chin, bringing their eyes level. “We cannot shy away from what we do, Quill. The more control one has over the world, the less absolution they should expect for their choices. Do you understand this?”
Quill drew a breath. “Yes, mother.”
Ink smiled. “Good. Do you know why we are here?”
“Because I hurt the dog,” the girl answered, the words fast and sudden, an unspoken fear now rendered in air. “Because I am dangerous.”
“No, my love,” Ink said as she lifted the kettle from the fire. “If we are to do great things with our gifts, we must understand and explore them. So we are here to see what you are capable of, in a place where we will not need to worry about the harm that might be done or the prying of other eyes.” She added tea leaves to two cups and filled them with the boiling water. “I believe, daughter, that you are capable of things I am not.”
“What things, mother?”
“My letters reflect the world, and summon those reflections,” Ink said. “But, I believe you can write the world with your script, changing the meanings of words and things in turn. What remains to be seen are the stories you shall tell.”
Quill smiled as steam rose from the cups only to twist and fade in the firelight, the scent of tea light in the air, a bouquet of ghosts.
*
In the two months remaining before spring, Ink and Quill studied calligraphy and words and meanings and all of the things that might determine the young girl’s path and practice. Ink taught her to control her wrist and the pen, allowing for the word to find itself yet maintaining control, which Quill’s gift necessitated. The girl wrote endless variations of the word life, varying the style and the marks to bring forth its differing varieties. With a single world, varying only presentation and intention, she called forth wolves, bears, bees, flowers, dung beetles, birds, fruits, blossoms and fish. Ink marveled at her daughter’s talent, as she never mastered the capability of bringing forth change with complex abstractions.
Once she learned of life, Quill learned of death, using her pen to bring fast, slow, painless and, in the case of a particularly cruel fox she summoned, violent ends. While the girl balked at such exercises, Ink insisted. “You must understand what you can do, for good or ill, my love. If you know what it means to end a life, you recognize the gravity of the act. The same goes for creating it.”
Quill understood, and while the exercise of her power filled her with joy and pleasure, to witness its ramifications tempered her urges. In one particularly memorable lesson, Ink instructed Quill to write “Bloom” for a rare flower on the mountainside, which lived but a day. “Write the word in large script,” Ink said, “with the thickest lines your pen can manage. The word should be as enduring as you wish the act itself to be.”
With a shrug, Quill did as instructed, and watched the flower’s petals unfold, greeting the day. The next morning, and each morning after, Ink made it a point to sit Quill before the ever-blooming flower, to contemplate its meaning. Quill observed as its brethren bloomed in turn around it, only to fade, leaving the sole flower preserved in its midst. She watched as its vigor and health persisted while all the flowers around it browned in the sun or moldered in rain. The marvel of its endless birth, in the days following, wore on Quill, until its observation became a chore. When she complained Ink, her mother smiled.
“Do you understand, then?” She asked.
Quill nodded.
“Good. Do what you must.”
Quill wrote another word for the flower on the last day of their stay on the mountain. The following morning, as they began their trek toward the village, she plucked one of its now withered blossoms, as a reminder.
Ink passed away from consumption four years after, in Quill’s fifteenth year. The daughter watched her mother’s death in slow progression, and lifted pen only to ease her pain. Ink did not want a burial, a headstone with her name marking her.
“I want my name to be free,” she told her husband and daughter as she reached her end. “It should live in smoke and breeze and rain and soil.”
When Ink died, as she lay on her pyre, Quill hid the dried blossom she took from the mountain flower in Ink’s clasped hands. She wrote or said nothing of her mother that day, allowing the villagers words to stand as her own. For Ink and Quill, who worked magic with words, silence conducted the requiem.
The following week, the local magistrate’s wife bore a daughter. They issued an invitation to Quill, expecting the girl to refuse or simply ignore the missive. But, on the appointed evening, she arrived on their doorstep, her mother’s calligraphy tools in hand.
After the naming, the magistrate accidentally referred to Quill as calligrapher. A hush fell over the house, and his wife reached for a swatch of cloth to catch tears. Quill, though, gave a slight smile.
“My mother was The Calligrapher,” Quill corrected. “I have a different profession. I am a Scribe.”
The words started heavy on her tongue, but lifted in their truth, rising so the world might hear. She thought of her mother’s prophecy: What remains to be seen are the stories you shall tell.
Word be praised.
12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 4, December: True Story (For A New Year)
And then, the relentless miracle. Change.
12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 3, November: “Sea Tale”
In a moment of magical thinking, I imagine her waiting, calculating positions of the moon and the stars, counting subtle degree tics until I appear in front of the shotgun house, humid delta midnight clutching my dress. Of my presence, she says nothing, no surprise in her expression, just the cool disinterest of a cat. She strikes me as a woman who sits on her porch in evening hours and accepts what comes. Highball glass in hand, she gestures to the wicker chair opposite her. As I take the stairs, the old wood firm and solid under my sneakers, she pours bourbon then Deserrano into a second glass (from this springs my hope of precognition, a gift I covet). The drink burns and coats and sweetens, a taste to match the scent of the French cigarettes she removes and smokes, one after another, from the silver box on the table.
She doesn’t ask what I want, nor proclaim she knew that I would return. Why gloat over the inevitable?
We don’t speak. With her cigarette burned to the filter, glass empty, she waits, her hands folded in the lap of her purple sundress, ring laden fingers intertwined, the gemstones flickering in the porch light. I don’t need to rush. I know this. No deals here, no haggling, contracts or signatures. I am hers, and she needs no reassurances.
I tip back the glass, the warmth thickening in my belly as she rises and steps toward the front door, turns the ivory and brass knob. She makes no suggestion I should join her, enter.
I rise, hoping to feel the heat of her soles in the wood, a guide. Magical thinking, reassurances.
*
I started spending my time in the master bathroom tub, a stone and marble basin big enough for the two of us as newlyweds willing to see intimacy rather than discomfort. We had grown in the years of matrimony, our flesh thickening with wealth and habit; I wondered if it would still hold us both.
After sunset each night, I took a bottle of claret from the rack -- he refilled them and said nothing, no comment on clinking of the trash bags when the maid hauled them out the back door, chimes of my indulgence -- took off all of my clothes in the bedroom and slipped into the tub, submerging myself. I held my breath for long stretches, rising only to sip the wine, spiked with the minerals and chlorine in my sinuses. I imagined myself in all bodies of water; pools in Riviera hotels we visited on our honeymoon, a pond in a Connecticut clearing, the crystal diamond cold of a Swiss lake. I accepted all waters in these imaginings, no reluctance to drown myself in swamp bogs, dirty, polluted streams, the dark cold of the ocean. I dove, forcing myself to feel the emotions of water: terror, joy, bliss, peace, despair. The things I couldn’t capture in air, on terra firma.
The first creatures struggled from the water, thrusting and throwing themselves, choking and sick, to the shore. Eventually, they could stay, their limbs and shapes twisting and conforming and adapting to a new sphere of life.
Their ancestors -- upright, furred, warm and ever invested in the stuff of breeze -- saw the waters, the depths they lost, and attempted to go back, diving below the surface, forcing their limbs to purposes long lost. The sea dreamt of the land, the land dreamt of the sea.
The creatures between the two know the truth: nothing is content anywhere.
I asked him to put in a pool, said I wanted to exercise. I just wanted motion and space, to remember.
*
Peering back on the years, scrutinizing the words and the moments as best I can reassemble them, she meant no ill will. I came to her home, the place of her workings, her sanctuary, firm in my decision. She accepted me with cautious grace.
When I begged my request, she said, “If you do this, you cannot return here. You go to his world. This one closes to you.” In the moment, I heard a threat, the reckoning of a Faustian ledger delivered by a green-eyed devil of dark waters. But time stripped the melodrama from the scene, leaving only a truth told out of obligation.
If I could return, I would ask her what she thought of me in that moment, another besotted moppet begging for transformation beyond their understanding. Did she detect a hint of herself in me? Did she once stand in my place?
If time bent to my will, if I could occupy my own past as a ghost, a spirit swept backward in the spool and weave of history, I might stand beside that girl, whisper an urging in her ear: Pride and impulse masquerade as wisdom in the hearts of children. She wears no masks. Listen.
I learned nothing from her then. But there is time, there is time. Not all I wish, but perhaps what I need.
*
Cleaning out the desk, the signed papers gone from the cherry top, I find a photo, a Polaroid taken not long after we married. We sit beneath a cypress tree strung with paper lanterns, enough sunlight filtering through the heavy branches, the grand green arms of aging matrons, to cast us in a Garden District afternoon glow. The vintage sunglasses show hints of our eyes, mine looking forward to the camera lens, his cast down at a Walker Percy novel. We don’t need sunglasses, but wear them anyway, perhaps hungover. Any alcohol in the early days did me in, the pain and discomfort urgent yet forgettable once the sun set.
I’m holding a glass with something dark in it, flecks of green. A julep, perhaps. I’m wearing a sweater dress, a warm Derby Day? I can’t recall.
Early times for us, that I can see. The photo doesn’t capture the contact, but I can tell by the way my calve disappears behind his Chuck Taylor, balanced on his knee. In the first years, still fresh from the sea, I loved the feel of him against my legs, his warmth against the bare, unadorned skin. I wore open toed shoes whenever I could, allowing things of the ground to brush and gather between my toes. Some reminded me of salt, and I ached for home.
I dreamt of home then, but never considered returning. Our world, the one we made, an enchantment of time, opening the bright future before me, casting the past in a comforting sepia, a hardened amber. We never notice how hope for the future strips the past from us, a glowing hot torch cutting us free of yesterday’s mooring, cauterizing the inevitable wound. Thinking ourselves free, we recover, aim ourselves toward the horizon and all its paper lantern promises.
We imagine ourselves healed and whole, willfully ignorant to the possibility of nostalgic infections until they rise up, fall us in fever and regret. It subsides, we tell ourselves, it subsides. And it does, for a spell.
“The future is unwritten, the past is in remission.” I saw the worlds scrawled beside a mirror in a midtown bar. I couldn’t recall when I put the Sharpie in my purse, in the same pocket as my sunglasses.
*
Two factual inaccuracies.
One, I never gave up my voice, and neither did any of the others, as far as I know. Some chose silence, in fear, by force or in resignation, their suffering no choice.
Two, we never needed to sing for them, packed as they were beneath the decks, drowning in each other’s acrid scent. We simply needed to present ourselves, our beauty and flesh the only lure required. We sang for each other and ourselves.
For some men, accepting these truths proves a wild challenge, a beast even more mythical and impossible than my kind. For our sakes, try.
*
We spent our last weekend at our mansion in the Garden District, a finale bounded by iron gates and stone walls. Neither of us planned it in the sense of writing out lists, making dates. We built it in distances and silences, feigned affection and the intentional confusion of familiarity and love. Then fell the weekend where neither of us planned any events or activities to distract ourselves from us and it seemed as good a time as any. A window for breaking.
It started in contention, hissed accusations, shouted proclamations and slammed doors on a Friday evening. Not long after midnight, he appeared at the door of the master bedroom, a bottle of Kentucky small batch in hand and a half ounce in a Ziploc bag in the pocket of his robe. Recognizing neither of us had anything left to win, we drank Old Fashioneds, smoked joints on the porch and screwed, starved and unsatisfied, until sunrise loomed.
The party continued Saturday. Taking advantage of the outer walls, we didn’t bother with clothing, our bodies streaked with dirt and grass we washed off in the pool. The sun revealed us, the hidden angles and pockets of our flesh. Our feet left imprints of humidity and dirt on the marble floors of the mansion interior, paint dust ground into our skin from taking one another against the walls. We threw the freezer and refrigerator open, cooking anything we could manage, the dining table room festooned with hors d'oeuvres and frozen pastries. When we spoke, we spoke only of our earliest shared days, Adam and Eve reminiscing of the garden.
At sunset, he asked me to swim for him again, and through the euphoria of whiskey, marijuana and sex, I detected pain in the request, the sharp awareness of loss long coming. I agreed, pushed him down in one of the metal patio chairs and dove into the water. The cold welcomed me, allowed my smooth and certain passage, yielding to even my simplest gesture. I swam longer than necessary to please him, until I satisfied myself.
When I resurfaced, my arms shadows on the pool edge, my legs green stone in the wash of underwater lights, he asked me to sing. I refused, singed by the request. He nodded, poured us each a drink.
I dried in the night air and we listened to the city sounds for the first time in days, the world moving against mortar, shouts of reveling drunks, coughing engines and the brisk, clever ripostes of two lovers. I pictured a young woman stepping light on the sidewalk, dragging her fingers along the stone and iron bars, pinpointing our states and thoughts through touch, communion with our fortress.
We went to bed around midnight, mineral water in bottles at our bedsides, aspirin and vitamins floating in sour stomachs. He tried to hold me for a few minutes, then gave up. We turned toward different walls, curled ourselves.
Sunday morning, I ordered brunch and he made coffee. We talked about our tentative days. I would stay in, read a book, watch cooking shows on cable. He planned to pack some clothes, drive to a hotel in Baton Rouge, where his brother lived, and get a suite. He might attend Sunday dinner with family, or see a movie or two, enjoy the cool dark of a theater.
We both finished our breakfasts, cups of chicory coffee sweet with cane sugar. When we rose from the table, we went separate directions, not bothering to touch. We’d satiated our hunger for each other in the previous days, years, decades. We were full.
*
Where I come from, mothers tell stories of finding a landed lover, quaint bedside narratives of how the luckiest, swimming in the morning or lazing upon a rock, spot a gorgeous captain -- bronzed and pristine in sun or starlight -- or a rough handed but kind-hearted fisherman with a thick, heavy beard that clutches water as a sponge, ever cooling against skin and scale. The stories tell us to trust these men, princes in heart if not life. Leave your home, the unspoken subtext proclaims, let them uproot you in the name of romance and adventure. No one will blame you leaving us, and all of this, in the wake of love’s driving prow.
Where he came from, the elegant aquatic world of the wealthy -- with yachts and coastal clubs and marina fees -- hired sailors and blowhards tell tales of our great beauty, enchanting songs and capricious cruelty. Mythological femme fatales of the ocean, gorgeous and vicious in equal measure. We drag men under, steal their breath, eat them alive. But men of worth (defined, most often, by the mind of the teller and the recipient alone) may capture us in heart, turn us from our villainous ways. By the power of their attention and affection, we climb aboard, abandon our fins and scales for soft, graceful legs with skin that burns in sunlight, fine hairs demanding constant care and attention if we hope to please. If they can conquer with love, remove us from our unfathomable home in our exotic and cruel beauty, we become constant and consistent brides, bearers of children and makers of homes. And our mothers tell us, too, that this is good, to have assured futures, to not age into hags fit only for bogs and the low-lying mud of the sea shore, hungry and grim in our faltering years.
If our mothers and long-winded sailors are kind, they will cut the fairy tale, allowing hints of the truth to slip into their fables. In such tales, princes become abusive and cruel beasts, and those stolen from the sea return to it, with some poor man paying a cost. These reversals serve to warn, but also challenge, because who does not wish to earn the impossible, joyous ending? What damned child chooses caution when faced with magic?
Both types of stories rise from falsehood, and the tellers know it so. And despite the obvious lies, we, who believe and act on their words, harbor no ill will. How could we? The truth is so much harder for them to speak, and us to bear. The prince remains a prince, the sea princess a princess. But happiness is never ever after, despite your struggle, your protestations. There is no kingdom you won’t wish to walk away from someday. No monsters or heroes necessary for the ending. Just time.
*
She leads me through the shotgun house, an arrow straight path through a dining room with an oak table covered with jarred herbs, leaves and stems of plants and flowers, clay bowls with pestles and grinders. We pass through the living room with its old sofa, the carved legs strong and ornate, and thick quilts dragging the back of the rocking chair toward the floor. The bed sits unmade, her earthen scent mixed with floral incense thick in the air until we reach the kitchen in the back, where a pot of red sauce and meatballs wafts garlic and wine in resistance. She doesn’t pause as she opens the back door and descends the steps.
“The thing you want,” she says, “I can’t give you.” The yard slopes down before her, leading to the edge of bayou water, the heavy cypress trees half-concealing the moon, as coy as a lady’s fan. “But you can take it.”
Her fingers, nimble for their years, begin unfastening the buttons of her dress. She shrugs herself free of the cloth, allows it to pool in the grass. Her skin seems taut for its age, a few stretch marks present, veins visible beneath.
“You’re lovely,” I say, waiting for an explanation, expecting the details of an enchantment.
“We appear as we choose,” she explains. “I appear as I naturally would. Some of us appear young and vibrant, and others choose monstrosity, vicious fangs and webbed fingers. We appear as we wish the world to see us.” She walks behind me, warms hands feeling for the zipper of my dress. She pulls it down, fast and utilitarian, sliding the cloth over my shoulders. “You must be done with pretense.”
I nod, the moisture in the air alight on my skin, warming me.
“I’m ready,” I tell her, myself.
“Of course you are,” she says, then heads toward the water. When she reaches the edge, she turns to me, a slight smile on her face. “We are all ready to be free. We must simply accept it.”
Her feet slip into the water, vanishing in its darkness. She wades in with slight gestures, her body a whisper of waves, hushed rippling. I realize just how much I wish to become her, to join her. I want her certainty, her possession.
I think of a girl in the shallows, watching a boy leaning over a deck, a cigarette perched on his lip as the breeze ruffled his hair. I imagine what she might say if I swam up beside her, revealing what she would eventually choose to become. She would recoil at least, if not scream. We fear a sea hag as much as anyone.
She’s submerged to her neck now, her gray hair fanning around her shoulders, silver tendrils in moonlight.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I never listened.”
“Of course you didn’t.” She turns herself to me, her eyes wide and black now. “How can anyone hear when the ocean is so endless, so loud?” She beckons to me. “If you listen to it, though, without expectation, it offers so many things.”
I step forward, not following but accepting, understanding. Some day, when I choose, I will sing. For now, I will listen, I will swim, I will dive. Breathe silt, run mud through my fingers, eat fish and frogs I capture with my own wit and speed. My fingers will learn the gestures of the witch, my tongue the hexes and cries of the sorceress and siren.
Here there will be monsters. Here I am freed.
12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 2, “Fair Maiden”
Good to see you awake. Oh come now, no need for cursing, and no point in it, either. I made these talismans myself, learned the trick from a Welsh cunning man in my bloom years. Such a sharpish fellow, and knew his way around a lady, if you get my meaning. He assured me he knew your kind as well, and what he didn’t tell me himself I memorized from his books and journals. Deep sleeper, he was, especially after his cups and a nice romp. But my apologies, the mind wanders these days. Suffice to say, your curses have no value here.
And there’ll be no shape changing nonsense. The cage should ensure that. Cold iron frame and floor, a bed of shavings from a Rowan tree. Took some effort to lay hands on such items, but I’m a lady of some means. Money can’t solve your problems, they say, but it certainly gets you closer to the solutions, doesn’t it?
You must think me such a silly old thing. But I can’t begin to say how long I’ve waited for this. My whole life it seems. You’re a dream come true, my creature. But I don’t think I’ll wake up for quite some time, now that I have you here. So much for us to do, so many stories for us to share, so many secrets.
Oh, I know. You’ll try your deceits, your evasions. You’ve already started, lying about what you are when I see it clear as day. Of course you cheat, of course you lie. Your kind always do. But I know some secrets, too. Ancient words, lost phrases wrought by dead tongues that hold power over your sort. Songs that will burn you like balefire, lyrics that will flay you as a lash. And if those fail, well...it was designed for a gate, I believe, but it makes a fine spear once I took time sharpening up the tip. You’ll tell me. In time, I’ll even learn your name.
No, no that one. Not that falsehood you tell everyone else. Your fair name. The one you hide. I know the ways of the good folk, and, despite my years, I am not one for you to trifle with, my dear.
Stop crying. Your kind can’t feel, at least not in the ways that matter. You can’t love, you can’t dream, you can’t despair. You know no hope, no faith, no fidelity. Fair folk, good folk. Such lies. False praise offered to the nightmares we fear, the vile devils lurking in the forest. We offer compliments in terror, in fear you’ll hear what we truly think of you and invoke your wrath. Wrath, that one your kind knows too well, but then again, so do I. We will see who feels it deeper soon enough.
I must admit, in my first encounters with your sort, I considered you fair indeed. I recall when my sister, Cecily, and I saw our first, in the shaded clover-field behind the manor, in the circle of skinny, thick-capped toadstools your kind favors so. We watched in joy and awe, my twin and I, as the sprites capered and danced across the glade, wispy gold and emerald wings illuminated by the scant rays of light seeping through the canopy of oak and elm. Tiny silver limbs as graceful as birds, luminous skin awash in liquid sunbeams. We loved them so, those kind fairies. They took berries direct from our hands, and washed themselves in the thick, sweet cream Cecily and I stole from the kitchen. Those dear pixies even posed for the pictures we took with my father’s camera, smiling and giggling and pretending at sweetness and kind-hearts.
The pictures, now, I regret. We were only children, you must understand. We simply wanted to prove the existence of the fair folk to father and mother, who clucked at our stories, called us sillyheads and dreamers. We never knew father would sell the photos to the newspapermen, hoping to shore up his income from the struggling mill. Just children, Cecily and I; how were we to understand the bitterness and cynicism of the scientists and the preachers, who analyzed the photos and declared them hoaxes, simply because they didn’t fit within their clean, ordered views of this world? Because they couldn’t understand you, my friend, they denied you, and stained our family name with falsehood and greed.
And, of course, your kind punished us as well. As soon as we handed the photos over to father, the fae never again appeared in our glade, not for the newspapermen or the professors or the illusionists with “hoax” and “charlatan” lurking on their tongues. When we needed you, you vanished, spurned our kindness and our love. But I forgave that, as children always forgive, with their hearts still rich in stores of mercy. I still loved you; I still believed.
But not Cecily. For Cecily, I will never forgive.
As the world turned on us, she fell to silence. Where I defended and proclaimed the truth of what we saw, of what the camera captured in our glade, Cecily simply faded, turning her head from the hateful accusations and poisonous inquiries of supposedly learned men. And you bastards never helped. You never returned to prove us honest and true. The glade sat fallow of its magic, no matter how many times we visited, Cecily’s wrist in my grip, pulling her along. I watched my beloved reflection wither in shame and hurt.
On a terrible morning, a year or so after the last of the professors and rag scribes appeared on our door, I asked her to follow me down to the forest for another picnic and fairy watch, and she, her lip fixed, her eyes cruel and iced, refused.
“It was a childish game, Minerva,” Cecily hissed. “And we’ve done enough harm.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered, her caustic words burning, eating away at my spirit.
“Father and mother can barely show their face in town for the laughter and whispers. Have you not noticed we haven’t returned to school? We’re not welcome there anymore. They call us hucksters and liars, and they speak the truth, especially of you.”
“But you saw them.” I begged her, my hands clutching her matching dress, her grim expression a mocking, wicked mirror of my own, etched in sorrow and despair, her eyes a vicious, brilliant emerald. “You saw the fairies.”
“I saw nothing but what you intended with your stories and your lies and your tricks of camera and light, Minerva.”
“You lie!”
Her fingernails stung as they raked across my cheek, the echo of the slap thunderous in the still of our shared bedroom. Cecily stood before me, her hands clenched into fists, her voice the warning hiss of a boiler reaching its burst. “Lie? You are nothing but lies,Minerva, and I shall never listen again. Never again say the word fairy, in my presence or that of anyone else. You should simply forget the word and grow up. Your tales of magic are soured in their repetition and the ill they’ve done. Leave me in peace.”
She stormed out of the room before I could defend myself, but I had no defense to offer. I understood. I could see the truth.
Another betrayal by your brood, another cruelty. You’d taken her, and left one of your own in her place. The beast who spoke such harshness to me was not my sister, my beloved, but a changeling. Cecily, my world, was lost to the Summerlands, whisked away to Arcadia.
I kept this knowledge hidden, acquiesced to her demands. I spoke no more of the fae in the garden or the so-called hoax I’d forced upon my beloved twin. In time, we returned to school, to the life of the town, and the incident of the fair folk photos slipped first from rumor then from memory. I kept silent, let the monster I shared a room with grow comfortable in its endless deceits.
At night, I watched it in the soundless, unbreathing paralysis your kind call sleep. I tried to detect the rise and fall of its chest, held mirrors to its nostrils, sought any sign of the sister I loved. At times I could almost fool myself, but I knew. I knew the changeling for what it was. And, with enough time and study, I learned what I needed to do.
I waited until the winter, the solstice night, when it would have less strength to draw upon. I crept from my bed, the heavy iron, stolen from the laundry, straining my dry grip. I looked at the thing pretending at Cecily in the moonlight, imagined what horrors my dear sister suffered in your homeland, what hideous tortures such beautifully cruel creatures could design for someone who dared expose their existence. For a moment, that grim night, I blamed myself for what befell her, but never as much as I blamed you. I did it for her, you understand. For her memory, for the child I loved. I raised the iron high above my head, my forearms and shoulders burning, and drove it down. The changeling didn’t scream; it gurgled and sobbed, a sick animal, as I raised the iron again and again, until the room fell silent and rich with the scent of copper.
Mother and father paid for silence, for the kind town doctor, a longtime family friend, to report the changeling’s death as an accident. They declared me a case of nerves, an unfortunate and hysteric witness to my sister’s sudden death. I spent my young womanhood in Kent, in an institution specializing in the rehabilitation and treatment of young, wealthy ladies best kept away from polite society. For years, I endured forced indolence, injections of insulin, baths freezing and boiling, and then intense electric shocks, a rubber bit holding down my tongue. The tortures went on, long after I learned not to defend my actions, to declare the truth of what I ended that night. I gathered my pain, my suffering. I sharpened and fashioned it into a mission, an agenda to root your sort out, to inflict equal retribution for my suffering, for what you did to Cecily. Believe me, beast; in my “rooms”, such a pretty name for cells, I lived this moment time and time again.
In my nineteenth year, my father and mother both passed of the influenza in a cold November. With no one willing to see to my continued treatments,and having reached the age of majority, the institution released me, freed to return home and claim what remained of the estate. I viewed my release as a confirmation from providence, a divine consent to carry out my plans. But when I stepped through the gates of my family home, the valet’s skeptical gaze holding me fast, I assiduously kept my eyes from the meadows and glades, focusing instead on the crumbling, ill-tended manor house. I would not betray my true intentions, risk imprisonment again. I returned home no mere girl, but as a warrior, a hunter. A killer of fae. If only I could find them.
In the guise of improving my constitution, I took up archery and rifles, walking in the woods for long periods, seeking out faerie rings and other signs of your wicked breed. With the claim a well honed intellect might keep me from dark musings, I filled my father’s old study with tomes and folios of folktales and myth, disguised and hidden among the novels. I trained myself, and even took a long sojourn to “America”, two years I truly spent in study with cunning men and wise women of the surrounding islands. I even learned Gaelic from an old priest in Galway, who held fast to the island’s traditions, preaching a rich tapestry of Catholic faith and Pagan sorcery. When I returned home, I knew myself ready and capable, a crusade before me.
And then I met my Ted. I found him on a hunt, when I, following a potential fae wearing the guise of a fox, wound up in the sights of his rifle; later, he would refer to the moment in fond, sepia terms, calling me his Lovely Wolf. His family owned a summer cottage in the village, his father a wealthy investor and banker in London. Ted had returned from the war with nerves, and took up residence the familial country retreat. Fresh air and verandahs did little to assuage him; instead, he took to hunting, stalking the forest, his rifle in hand. Perhaps he saw the forests of Germany, of Czechoslovakia and Poland rather than the English meadows, his senses awash in cordite and burnt pine. I never asked.
Ted didn’t judge, even when I told him of my time in treatment (though I kept the reasons vague). He didn’t question why I wore breeches or could handle a rifle with ease, why I could land an arrow in the bull’s with each draw. The war left Ted a hunter, and in this, we found easy repose with one another.
And when Emma came, when I first held her, I knew I must devote myself to her protection, to safeguard her where I failed Cecily. I painted the runes and markings into the decor of her bedroom, wove them into window frames, crib blankets and carved them in the bottom of prams. I sat up with her at night, even when she didn’t cry out, and kept her close when we ventured outdoors, a pistol with a cold iron ball in the bottom of our basket among the cheese and bread. I feared for her, terrified a fae would come and carry her off, another punishment for my actions as an innocent child.
With so much of my attention focused on my daughter, I neglected Ted, and your brood, ever so clever, noted my mistake with sly, cruel wit. And you struck, swift and subtle.
Consumed with Emma’s safety and protection, I didn’t note the growing number of meetings Ted began to take in town in the evenings, supposed dealings and negotiations with local merchants and farmers at the Pub. Soon, week-long trips to London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Paris grew common, leaving Emma and I to fend for ourselves. Ted claimed his father, growing ill and slipping toward dotage, demanded he take the reins of the family business and I, in all honesty, found it much easier to do the things required to ensure our daughter’s safety without his semi-interested eyes upon us.
When he began to come home smelling of whiskey and lilacs, I attributed it to the habits of wealthy and respectable men. As Ted retired his hunting jackets and boots for Saville Row jackets, Parisian shirts and calf-skin shoes, I simply assumed his new position required a more fashionable and aristocratic touch. And when he ceased to touch me, returning to our home in the wee hours, I assumed exhaustion and stress.
The coughing began, and then I grew suspicious, or at least concerned. When I found spots of blood on a handkerchief left in the garage, I knew.
One evening, when my husband failed to return for dinner, I bundled Emma in her blankets and administered a slight bit of Laudanum to ensure her sleep. I mounted my horse, a mare well-known for her steady gait and temperament, and rode into the village.
I found the car not at the pub, but parked a few streets down, in front of McCormack’s Music Shoppe. The McCormacks, long-time residents of the village, knew my parents well, and I possessed a few memories of their daughter, a beautiful Irish lass with the isles’ famed auburn tresses and pale skin. Neither had changed, as I spied the slattern, now aged to ripeness, in the upper window, my Ted’s tanned skin quivering against her own. I could swear she looked at me with her cruel, amber eyes, gauged me in satisfied malice.
In the months to come, I saw Ted less and less, as I doubled my efforts to shield Emma. I suspected the nymph posing as Miss McCormack not only intended to enchant my Ted, but her efforts spoke to a larger plot of your kind against my beloved daughter. When Ted returned home, his cough thick and his skin coated in sweat and perfume, I thought only of our child, and worried at the quality of my wards.
The doctors, when, at last, Ted allowed me to call them, diagnosed him with consumption, though I knew what truly plagued him. The foul siren who trapped him in her enchantment used him well into the night, moon after moon, burning his spirit and soul in her fire, filling his lungs with smoke. I knew no sorcery to free him, when he did not, it seemed, wish for freedom.
With his last breaths, his skin stretched across his bones, his muscles taught as he gasped for air, he called her name and hers alone. The words seared my ears, a flame only retribution could quench.
And I had it. The foolish bitch had the gall to attend the funeral, to enter my parlor, to cast her eyes upon my mourning veil and the face of my daughter, the flesh of the man she so callously killed. No shame among you supposed good folk, but no souls, either, I suppose.
As the ceremony came to its end, I approached her in private, and told her Ted had left a letter for her among his things. I promised her I had not read it, though I often suspected his attentions and affections belonged to another. I spoke without anger but with regret, a clever performance. I say with some pride that I convinced the whorish beast of my overwhelming shame at failing in my duties as a wife, that I had driven such a wonderful man to her arms. I told her I was only thankful she could achieve what I had not, and bring my dear Ted a moment of respite from my frigid and closed heart. And she ate it up as your own enchanted food, wrapped in the spell of my words.
I arranged for us to meet at the river when the sun set, far from the eyes of the town. I told her I wanted no rumor to bother either of us, and that Ted, in death, deserved the respect of the town. When she arrived, her hair aflame in the moonlight, I almost hesitated, moved by her naivete, her foolishness. But, fair is fair, one might say. I swung the fist-sized rock I had tied into the cloth sling at dusk, struck her temple clean and sharp as David. She blacked out before the dew touched her dress, and her eyes didn’t so much as flutter as I dragged her into the water. I dropped the second rock I had gathered, the heavier one I could only just lift, on her chest, pinning her in the current. A nymph made of fire required drowning, and I obliged. When they found her downriver two weeks after, her hollow husk bloated and festering with rot, no one suspected foul play. A few townsfolk, who suspected her affair with Ted, attributed it to regret and despair for a forbidden love lost.
Emma and I lost nothing. We inherited Ted’s portion his family wealth, and, coupled with my own, allowed us to live without lack and in great abundance and opulence, if we should choose. I waited a year, closed up the manor, and took Emma to America, where we could live in ease, away from your kind and their vicious intentions. After losing Ted and Cecily, and in my fear for my only remaining beloved, I felt exhausted, and sought the New World as a refuge from the grim, monstrous history of Britain.
We landed in New York, and Emma, fed with the joy and culture of such an impossible melange of people and potential, grew to beauty and intelligence, a skilled musician and poet. She married a professor of classics at Columbia, the wealthy scion of an old line, and, after a few years in the city, her husband took a teaching position at Oxford upon the publication of a successful and stunning monograph on Arthurian Legend. Of course, they asked me to come with them, to reopen the old manor as a country house for our family of two shores.
At first, the old fear rose in me, but such fear subsided. I had long managed to convince myself that, though I could never forgive, I had abandoned my aims toward eradicating your kind, of repaying you for my Cecily, my Ted, the suffering of my youth. When the prospect of returning home rose, despite my age, I felt the old righteous vigor return to me, the old purpose, long buried by social events, theater and the obligations of a wealthy widow, waxing in my thoughts, as heavy and undeniable as a harvest moon.
When I first opened the doors of the family estate, I felt the ghosts surrounding me, the tension of all the business I ignored. I felt the sorrow of Cecily, come to some poor end in a land alien to her. I sensed the suffering of Ted, forced to abandon his family, his loves, by the treacherous seduction of the foulest fae. I promised to act, to do what I long ignored.
It took me years to cultivate the faerie circle, to determine the proper fungus and methods of growth to ensure a good lure. I spent days and nights studying up on the old texts, relearning the wards and rites, the songs and lyrics necessary to deal with your sort. Still, I saw none of your kind, as much time as I spent stalking the grounds.
What I lacked, it seems, is the bait. Rather fortunate, isn’t it, that Emma and John needed to return to the states for a conference? Rather fortunate that a grandmother, not far from the city, would know no greater honor than to take watch over her granddaughter for a few weeks at her house in the country?
You couldn’t resist could you? A child of only three years left alone in a faerie ring? What fae could resist such a treat?
Oh, stop that nonsense right now. A fisherman? Nonsense, that pole has seen no use, beast. Yes, I’m sure you were concerned about the child. If not you, who would steal it, whisk it away and leave a predatory impostor in its place? Enough now of the lies, I won’t hear them. Now, now is for truth, and you will tell me everything.
I think, perhaps, we will start by determining what sort of seelie or unseelie you truly are. You could make it easy on yourself and show me, but...well, you can see the manacles over there, the iron blades. I could simply remove your skin.
Save the tears. I know how false they are. And save your breath as well. I built this workshop years ago, when I first returned, far from the hearing of dogs, let alone the ignorant, self-involved neighbors. Besides, it wouldn’t do to have little Helena learn grandma’s secret, would it? That would spoil all of our fun.
Speaking of the little one, I should check up on her. The soporific will wear off soon, and I’d hate for her to wake alone. Children, though the concept is foreign to your lot, should feel safe, loved and cherished. I’ll return tonight, with some food, though of much lower quality than you’re likely used to in Arcadia, and we’ll begin our discussions. Think on how honest and sincere you wish to be, and what might come if you fail to participate to my satisfaction. I am an aged woman, as you can see, and my time in this world, at least, is not so long as I might like with so much before me.
Consider, especially, this charade of your supposed humanity. I know you are no more a man than the devil himself. Fae lie.
If you waste my time, I will end yours. Rest assured.
Rest up. The night will be long.
*
“Rouse yourself, sleepyhead.”
Helena woke to a warm hand caressing her face, the soft couch cushions holding her.
“I fell asleep.”
Nana smiled. “Of course you did. All that fresh air.”
“I had bad dreams.”
Nana tutted, lifted the girl into a sitting position on the couch. Helena felt dizzy, but anxious, her tummy cold and hollow. Old, kind hands passed her a mug full of warm milk, the porcelain almost hot on small, tender fingers.
“You’re safe now, my love. Always safe. I promise.” Nana watched her for a moment, a soft smile on her face. Then it caught, hardening and twisting into a grim line as straight and sharp as a blade, lips white. Helen found her jaw caught between two bony fingers, her head tilted upward into the light, vexed eyes gazing down into her own, seeking something the girl couldn’t fathom.
“Nana?” Helena felt tears and a scream pool within her, rise. She fought them down, sensed a danger in the urge. She wanted to recoil, but knew better by instinct.
Her grandmother’s face relaxed, her fingers releasing the girl’s hin. Helena felt a sweater-clad arm moving over her shoulder, cold bumps rising to meet the fabric.
“Sorry, dear. I thought I saw something in your eyes. Something I saw once as a girl.” She ran an aged hand over her grand-daughter’s soft curls. “It was nothing. You’re a good girl, Helena. Such a good little girl.” She paused, pulled the child onto her lap. “Did you know I had a sister once?”
“You did?” Helena asked, hesitant.
“I did.” Nana nodded. “Let me tell you a story. Of faeries and maidens.”
“Does it have a happy ending?”
Nana grinned, as youthful as the girl on her knee. “We shall see, my love. We shall see.”
12 Stories, 1 Year: Story 1, September, “Muse Aspirant”
Before modest fame, when seeing my name on an art magazine meant I’d subscribed to it, I dated a novelist. She lived in a brownstone in Oak Park -- not far from where Hemingway grew up, she pointed out, though she hated Hemingway -- and taught graduate workshops at The University of Chicago. She enjoyed teaching the workshops because, as she explained on our second date, they felt excused, a justified reason not to sit in front of her computer and write unlike all the other things she might do in a day; running errands, shopping online, getting groceries, napping, showering, eating, etc. etc. If the sun hung in the sky, anything that didn’t involve words on pages struck her as frivolous, minutes and hours squandered on picayunes.
Hearing that confession, I should have known to pay for my own dinner, offer her a cheek rather than lips in front of the restaurant and ignore her future texts, but I didn’t. I liked her; her hair smelled of lilac shampoo and her breath tasted of bourbon and coffee. So long as she could drag herself out at nights and buy my drinks and get us into shows and openings she could torture herself all she liked. I wasn’t a great person at twenty-seven, but who is?
We went on for a time, and drifted apart with the violence of continents, all our angles scraping against each other, grinding and burning long before we erupted. At the end, she viewed me as a free-spirited dilettante, talented but shiftless, prone to phone calls and visits during her precious work hours, wasting mornings hungover on the couch in my studio. I grew tired of her unvoiced judgements, and the way she treated her writing as a Catholic tradition of penitence and martyrdom. She treated each page as a boulder on a hill, rolling down blank at the end of the day only to fill the next. When she finished her sixth novel, a month or so after we started dating, she brought it up as if she had just buired an aged relative, the easing of a burden rather than celebration. I never told her she was bitter. Maybe she knew how I felt. Perhaps she felt it, too.
That’s the thing the romcoms leave out. When the peppy, whimsical girl with the cheerleader looks, librarian glasses and vintage shop couture gets together with the workaholic strait-lacer, no grand revelations ensue. The stressed out yuppie doesn’t discover a new lust for visceral living and the throwback hippie doesn’t learn the joys of monogamy and the stability of a balanced checking account and a sensible car. They either split up because they’re fundamentally different or life shaves and chisels them into the same unremarkable shape it does most everyone. People don’t change their fundamental worldviews, no more than Nietzche saw a sunset and turned to God.
Eventually the fights took on the weight of chores and the reconciliations felt as rehearsed and tired as a closing run play. My beautiful novelist became just another beautiful novelist. I recall who said it was over, but the fact doesn’t matter enough to record. We both knew.
One night, early on, we lay in her bed, my head resting on her abdomen, the rise and fall of her stomach massaging my neck. She’d gathered up my hair, draping it between her breasts, so she could tease the ends with her fingertips. Neither of us bothered to get dressed, even though the February cold knelt on the city, trying to break its shivering back. She kept her brownstone spring warm all through the winter, and, in the sleepy haze, I asked if I was her muse.
The fingertips stopped and her muscles tensed beneath me, a brief spasm. Then she relaxed, took a breath, and said:
“I have a muse. But it’s not like you think.”
Before I could rise from the bed and gather my clothes, she started. “I’d just published my first short story collection.” She took my hair in her fingertips again, her eyes focused on the space above the bed, “I spent most days waiting on acclaim and growing ever more resentful it didn’t come.”
She had just turned thirty, teaching part-time at a community college in Detroit with sagged floors and whiteboards gone the color of soot-stained clouds. A decent-sized press published her anthology with a limited run in hopes of strong critical reception spurring on further printings. The reviews were neither good nor bad; they simply didn’t exist. The aspiring novelist, let’s call her Anna, didn’t know many other writers, let alone writers with sufficient name recognition to start a buzz. So the book fell on disinterested eyes; silence reigned in the literary forest.
“I started a book tour once the Spring session released.” She sat up, shifting herself so that my head rested on her upper thighs. The bright readings lamps mounted above the bed cast a corona off her red hair. “And I mean book tour in the sense I paid for all the travel and my editor arranged readings at bookstores and some colleges.”
In the course of three months, she developed mental maps of the interchangeable layout of Barnes and Noble stores, drank more cups of curated coffee and ate more organic rice krispy treats than any person should ever tolerate. She read her stories to small crowds who listened and admired her not because they knew her stories, but because she managed to get them published. She stood before them, in their aspiration and fear, alive and real, The Astounding Published Girl. “I liked them,” she said, “I could remember when I was like them, and they always bought a book and got it signed, even if they never planned to read it.” They’d hold the signed book as if Anna had just handed them a photo of The Holy Grail, a confirmation of the validity of their own quest. Others bought a copy as proof of culture. “The society ladies drove me up the fucking wall,” she said, then took a cigarette, lit it, and put it between my lips; I forget, sometimes, how attentive she could be. “They’d show up for a reading in their Anne Taylor or Land’s End, flushed from wine over dinner, and they’d whisper to each other relentlessly. I didn’t even need to show up for them. I could have just put a Dostoyevsky tape in a Teddy Ruxpin and, as long as someone verified it was culture on some arts page, they would show up and buy a book for the coffee table.”
“Did you meet anyone who read you?” I handed her the cigarette so she could finish it.
“A few. The sort of people who did their homework for things like that. The clerks and owners often read a story or two, out of interest as to who would be in their store if nothing else. They were complimentary mostly, and some of them had some good interpretations.” She smiled. “This one guy in Madison told me that my stories filtered working class values through fairy tale promise to point out the absence of traditionally happy endings in America’s Rust Belt. Then he invited me back to his place, so I guess he missed some subtext.”
I took my cue, raising a hand to massage her upper thigh where it met her waist. “People ignore what they want to.”
She considered the end of the cigarette, ignoring my ministration. “That they do.
“I spent most of my time that summer either driving to the next destination or trying to sleep in hotel rooms, without time or inclination to write a word. On masochistic days, I called my agent to see if any new press rolled out, but aside from local notices, nothing. Some nights, I filled out job applications using the shitty Ramada or Best Western wi-fi, and others I went out with attendees and bookstore staff. I saw the Midwest through grad-school dive bars and hipster lounges, smoking other people’s cloves and drinking rail bourbon.” She stubbed out the cigarette, shifted herself from under me and lay down. I rolled onto my stomach to see her grinning. “I told myself I was practicing to become Bukowski, a woman who wore clearance dresses from Sears to the bar and worked a series of crap jobs to pay for whiskey and mailing supplies.”
I laughed, the image in my mind precise. Her use of words often did that to me, enchanted language and the sorcery of my visual imagination calling up moments and fantasies as real as the places we occupied. More so, in some cases.
“It happened in Columbus,” she continued, “in the beginning of August, on the thin border of hope for a Hail Mary and resignation into obscurity. The bookstore I performed at struck me as one of the better I visited, the shelves not overloaded but organized. The children’s area featured a puppet theater made of gorgeous pine with its own small, crushed red velvet curtain. The owner and her husband, a former auto executive, took me to dinner at a delicious Thai place with bubble tea, the first I ever had. They listened to my stories with genuine interest, and, unlike many of the people I met, didn’t apologize for their city and its self-perceived lack of culture.
“The reading went as planned, about twenty or so people filling the chairs in the attached cafe. I half-hoped they would let me read from inside the puppet theater; my face framed by the miniature, gold-leaf proscenium and curtains I could use as hand towels, but I read from a wooden stool. The audience sipped their coffees, sometimes nodding or glancing their phones. I spotted the graduate students and hipsters, the hopefuls the culture collectors, my usual suspects.”
She paused, fixing an image in her mind. “Emerald green. She wore an emerald dress, the sort of thing Eva Gardner would slip on for a night on the town, her black hair drawn back in a tight bun, held in place by a burnished silver comb. When she lifted her hand to push up her glasses, she did so with fingers wrapped in black satin evening gloves.”
Anna cupped my cheek and jaw with her hand, a thumb touching the edge of my lower lip. I took her hand with mine and moved it away, placing it on the pillow, interlocked with my own.
“Sorry,” she said. “I knew she was a muse as soon as I saw her, but I accepted it with the gloves. I knew the same way you think you’d know God if you saw them on the street, a perfect recognition, natural and beyond question.
“I tried not to speed up as I read, but added emphasis to the words, though they had felt trite since early June. The thought of her standing, slinging a lovely purse over her bare shoulder and walking out the door, a judgement of my lack, rolled my stomach, wrung my throat dry and drenched the small of my back in sweat. If she left, I wouldn’t find her again. I had dared to ask existence if I had what it took, and if she left, I would have to live with the definitive answer. I questioned whether I could. I couldn’t imagine it then. I still can’t in any real way.”
“You would have been fine,” I said, putting my free arm around her waist, tugging her toward me, but she remained in place on the bed.
“I would have survived,” she admitted, “but that’s not the same thing is it?
“It didn’t matter, regardless. When I finished the reading, she lingered on the fringe of the crowd as the line of people waiting to purchase books formed, and then took a spot in the back. The fear of her departure transformed into a vacillating hope and terror in what she might say to me when she reached the signing table, what I would say to her, with my faux-fancy pen in hand, dirty laundry in the trunk of my car and pad thai on my breath. I was in no shape to entertain divinity. The seventeen signatures and forgettable discussions between her and myself remain the longest distance I’ve ever experienced.
“Then she was simply there, the last of the stragglers gone, a muse before me. She removed a copy of the book from her bag, a rectangular, black leather satchel without branding, and set it on the table in front of me. I noted wear along the seams of the cover, some dog-earing of pages. Proof of consumption.
“‘Who do I make it out to?’ I asked her, her right lip tilting slightly in response.
“‘I go by Cali.’
“‘Of course.’ I inscribed the book ‘Hope you enjoy. And if you played some part, thank you, Cali.’ I never meant an inscription more.”
“You’ll need to sign your books for me sometime,” I interrupted. A jealous, childish thing to say, but I couldn’t stop myself. She spoke with fondness and ardor, a romantic kindness yet to focus its attention on me, who needed it so much at the time.
She kissed her fingertips and put them to my forehead. “Of course. Cali picked up the book and read the inscription, closed the book, and then looked at me, her eyes the emerald green of her dress, shimmering in the store lights.
‘No hand in this one,’ she said, ‘but the next?’
“‘Can I take you for a drink?’ There was nothing I wanted to say less, but needed to say more. She nodded, and I stood up. The owners didn’t stop us as we headed toward the door, just grinned. Perhaps they believed she was an old friend or lover. On an instinctive level, they may just have been the kind of people who knew not to interrupt.
“I followed her to a piano bar a few doors down, a collection of candle-lit tables in the middle of a room flanked with half-moon booths in pearly vinyl. A middle-aged Chinese woman played a Philip Glass piece while couples and small, acquainted groups chatted. Cali passed the bar, then sat at one of the booths toward the back of the room, waiting for me to join her. I wanted to order her a drink, but she waved me over.
“By the time I sat down, a bartender arrived with two Manhattans, the cherries dark and fresh.
“‘Thought you might want these,’ he said to Cali.
“She laughed, a rich, low trill, and took the glasses. ‘You thought correct. We’ll fetch the next ones.’
“He nodded and returned to the bar, as if making drinks and delivering them to people who never ordered them was as natural as wiping down the mahogany.
“‘Good trick,’ I said.
“‘No trick,’ she corrected. ‘A trick implies a deception. I gave him an idea and he followed it. No lies, no cheating. That’s the mistake people make about us.’
“‘What do you mean?’
“‘They think we’re cheating, lying.’
“‘You give people ideas, if the history doesn’t lie. Good ones.’
“‘Ideas are everywhere. Everyone has an idea for something; a book, a movie, a television show, a better way to mince onions. But we don’t do the work. That’s for people like you.’
“I sipped the bourbon, hoping it would shoulder the blame for my blush.
“‘So that’s all we are? The hands of the Muses?’
“‘Historically speaking, people have died to become our hands. But that’s a garish thing to say. Far too blunt.’
“I saw an opportunity to control the situation, if only for a second, and seized on it. ‘So give me something better.’
“Cali plucked the cherry from the bottom of glass with a fork and set it on the napkin, bourbon and syrup bleeding onto white. ‘And now we’re horse trading.’
“‘Don’t muses gift?’
“She shrugged. ‘The inspiration comes without strings, but I don’t give it to just anyone. I was easy in my youth, but a lady gets older and wiser. Anyone who knows my charms now had better deliver.’ She leaned in, tapping her fingers on the top of my palm, the gloves cool and smooth. ‘Do you know what it’s like to give someone the best of yourself, something beautiful and unique and incredible, and then watch them squander it, or let it fall into nothing? It breaks your heart.’
“I thought of my book, the stories it contained, the time never wasted, at least not for me, but wasted on others, perhaps. Then again, there might not have been anything for them to treasure, to unearth. I could hope, but unless someone read them, I was Schroedinger’s cat, smothering in poison or invincible.
“‘What makes you think I’ll live up to you?’
“‘What if I told you that you already had?’
“I was surprised at that, obviously,” Anna said, propping herself up on the mattress. “I’d almost resolved myself to the idea of the book fading from shelves and existence, without impact. The thought that it came from some divine source struck me as laughable, which is exactly what I did.
“‘I wasn’t joking,” Cali said, sliding the rest of her drink to me. ‘I’ve been giving you ideas for a while now. Just to see what you’d do with them.’ She paused, reading my face. ‘I didn’t give you the best ones. Not yet, anyway.’
“I recalled the hours I spent in front of the computer, wrestling the images and thoughts onto the page. I tallied the relationships failed, the social events skipped, the nights I could have gone out but didn’t because I needed to finish a few pages before work or so I could forgo sleep to work through the night. I sat across from a muse with nicotine stains on my fingers, strained eyes and a cramped back from office chairs as she told me I’d been tested, completed a grueling trial with a mediocre prize. I pulled my hand back before it reached up to slap her rouged cheek, the color false and suddenly gaudy.
“‘You can hate me if you want,’ she said, ‘but I can still make you great. If you want it. If you want to do the work. I can give you the stories, the ones you want, the ones they want, but you’ll have to do your part. You’ll have to do the work. That’s the sacrifice you make for me, and if you refuse to make it, if you turn your back on it, well, I’m a fickle bitch these days, dear. You can count on that. But if you do your part, it won’t stop. Not even when you leave this world. They’ll see your worlds when you’re dust. I promise this to you. So, the question is,’ Cali paused, her eyes sharp, cold and shining, as cruel and rich as diamonds, ‘are you in?’”
“And you said yes?” I asked, a child anticipating the moral of a bedtime story, comfortable and certain of the ending, but Anna shook her head.
“I didn’t have to say anything. She already knew the answer. Cali gathered her things, kissed me on the cheek, and left. I never saw her after, but by the time the tour ended, I had the plot of my first novel worked out. It hit, it hit heavier than I ever imagined. I should have taken some time to enjoy the success; I traveled, of course, but never without a laptop, a notebook. I remembered what I owed, and what a woman lost in the Midwest with a lackluster talent, stupid tenacity and a book no one gave a damn about would trade, had traded, to get here, the price she once paid to feel like a failure. If I stopped, let go of what Cali gave me, could I have betrayed that woman more?
“This is my life,” Anna whispered to me, “and I hope you understand that.”
I nodded, because I thought I knew what she meant. She offered me a slight smile. It told me I was wrong, but already forgiven.
“Being with someone you love brings you peace, not obsession,” she whispered, kissed me. “So no, you will never be my muse.”
*
Things ended a few months down the road. Her words stuck in me, as insistent and cruel as a pin, though as the rifts split with greater frequency and intensity, I never connected them to that night. I lied to myself. At that age, I wanted her to perceive me as wild and untamed, a goddess who could nurture and kill without hesitation at either. I needed her to desire me with the acute demand of thirst or starvation. What people want, and what they want from love, changes. I didn’t understand then. I didn’t understand her. I wanted what she had, but not to know its cost. Revealing that to me, opening my eyes, ensured our end.
I never met a muse, and I doubt she did. The tale seemed a bit too trite, too intentional. I take it as a fable, a person she once admired elevated to divinity and cast as a metaphor for her overwhelming and inescapable pursuit of words and the worlds she created with them. Then again, perhaps she did meet a muse in a green dress once upon a time in Columbus.
Regardless, in the years following, as I sank deeper into my work, as the success came in trickles then at a steady flow, I began to understand the choice my novelist made, as I, too, began to pay.
I think she married, maybe had a child. I’d like to think she did. When her name comes up, I tune the ensuing conversation out, washing over it with my own fable. Perhaps, upon a time, I will find myself with my lovely novelist again, and this time, I will tell her a story. I will tell her the tale of a woman who couldn’t be a muse, so she went on to make her own things in the world. I will tell her how the woman, like Orpheus, refused to turn backward, terrified to see the waste and ruin in the wake of her own obsessive impulse. I will tell her I now understand a story I heard once from a lover, and I will ask her if she found the peace she sought. I will listen to her story, gathering the words, planting them within myself. They will bloom, quiet and beautiful, an inspiration.
3 For Halloween Number 3: Precision
Precision
Edmund Parsend grew up with faith. His father, a well-regarded conductor and composer, raised his son on a steady fare of Baroque symphonies, sacred music, religious hymns and chamber music intended for educated audiences occupying consecrated spaces. In our first year at the conservatory, on an evening drenched in wine and reminiscence, Edmund admitted he first realized his love of music in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as his father played a Rossini solo piece on the ancient and revered organ for a crowd of Easter morning congregants.
I, on the other hand, came to music not in faith, but in need. I could find, in my young life, no greater salve for the world’s sadness than a DeBussy glissando. The time signatures of Mozart, ordered and arranged, imposed a regularity and sense upon the world it refused to offer up itself. If, for a man such as Edmund, the presence of music confirmed the divine, for myself, it simply offered a concession for its lack.
Not long after making his acquaintance, I took to chiding Edmund for his peculiar, in my view, Sunday ritual. While I would stumble from bed in the glare of the morning sun and make my way to a café for breakfast and a drink, I knew Edmund sat in a pew somewhere within the city (he wasn’t particular about the houses of faith he attended, rotating through them as one would halls in a concert season), vibrant with expectancy for the first notes of the opening hymn. After services, he would retreat to his studio space at the conservatory and work on his compositions long into the evening. I tried to visit him there one Sunday and, as far as I can recall, it was the only time Edmund treated me with any true disdain. I wound up returning home not long after his irritated eyes met me at the door he refused to open further than crack.
And still, I considered Edmund my greatest companion and friend in those days. No one with a knowledge of music as broad as his own spoke of it with such candor and admiration, not even the struggling and failed composers and musicians who taught our lessons. Even in his criticism of a particular performance or piece, Edmund spoke with satisfaction and gratitude, as if any music, even that lacking aesthetic merit or adequate execution, deserved his thanks. His attitude tempered my quick tongue at times, and because of Edmund, I made certain connections in the musical circles of the city that offered me acceptance and prosperity I would not likely have earned on my own.
In our final year at the conservatory, both Edmund and I decided to pursue original compositions. My friend stated, quite staunchly, that he would not unveil or discuss his project until it met his satisfaction and, when asked about the going, would simply offer up a noncommittal “Fine,” or “It goes well.” This irritated me, for my composition struggled to find its footing, much as I struggled to find a voice. So many of the notes and arrangements seemed derivative and unoriginal, and left me questioning whether I should give up on the idea of writing entirely and focus, instead, on performance and technical precision, an area in which I excelled.
Approximately a month before the unveiling of our final works for the conservatory, I received a written invitation from Edmund, slipped under my door on a Friday morning. The missive asked me to attend a private performance of his senior composition in his conservatory studio on the following Sunday at sundown. My heart fell at this, as I had already begun the defeated mental rehearsal of asking for another semester in order to abandon my composition and focus instead on a technically laborious piano piece by Schopenhauer. Still, I resolved to attend to my friend, and, on the appointed Sunday, I knocked on the door of the studio as directed.
Once Edmund opened the door and greeted me, he led me into his studio for the first time. Unlike the disarray of my own workspace, my friend kept his studio immaculate: the sheets of handwritten music rising almost as tall as the ancient metronome on the table beside them, the books on theory and composition arranged neat and alphabetized on their hardwood shelves. A small table flanked by two chairs sat by the door, a spread of bread, cheese and charcuterie arranged with care on a silver tray atop it, the wine already opened and poured. The only thing in the room that seemed out of place was a well-worn leather trunk with brass hinging beside the piano.
Edmund bid me to sit at the small table and enjoy the wine and food, for the evening might run long and he, himself, had not taken proper dinner.
“Are you ready for the performance?” I asked him as I sipped my wine. Edmund grinned, fiercer than I imagined possible, given his casual cheer.
“I am more than ready,” he said. “In fact, this evening’s performance will be the culmination of not only my life’s work so far, but that of my father’s.” He gestured to the trunk. “That simple case,” he said, “contains some of the most important works on music and divinity the world has ever known.”
And with this, Edmund Parsend, the faithful man I’d grown to appreciate despite myself, unveiled the strangest and most unexpected story my ears ever encountered.
“My father,” he began, “was not only a musician, but also a philosopher and theologian. And in his early years, he developed a fascination with the music of the spheres. By the time he reached young adulthood, he had convinced himself not only that music reflected the design of the heavens, but that music itself was the heavenly design, and that all things in this world emanated from the ethereal music of the holy choirs.
‘Using some of the family fortune as well as the connections afforded to him by his close work with religious authorities, he came to own one of the largest collections of tomes, grimoires and songbooks addressing the idea of divine musicality, and from these, drawing on mathematical and alchemical texts as supplements, he sought a method for composing music that would, in essence, duplicate the song of creation.”
“What a foolish errand.” I swallowed a piece of prosciutto, which turned bitter in my mouth beneath Edmund’s sharp glare.
“He ended up believing the same,” Edmund allowed, “but once I expressed an interest in music, he began tutoring me in his work, exposing me to the texts in his collection. They’re all in the case, the greatest part of my family inheritance.” He rose from the table and walked over to the trunk, opening its tired lid. I followed him and glanced inside to see stacks of old books, the covers bound in unknown materials, wafting a faint scent of dust and incense. It also contained a stack of notebooks, hand-labeled by year and signed Gregory Parsend.
“Quite a collection,” I said, lifting one of the tomes from the stack. I could not identify the name, but believed it to be written in Hebrew. “These are probably worth quite a sum to the right antiquarian.” I ran my finger along the gold seal, marked with runes and glyphs, beneath the title.
“I would never sell them,” Edmund snipped. “Especially not now.”
“And what is so important about now?”
“I have finished the work.” Edmund said at last, allowing the words to permeate the room. “I have learned to compose in the music of the spheres.”
I chortled, unable to help myself. Edmund grinned again, as fierce as last time but with a twinge of something wild and cruel.
“My father was closer than he thought. I was able to acquire the last text I needed over the summer. Do you remember when I traveled to Austria?”
I nodded.
“I purchased the book, a text for translating Kabbalistic invocations to musical notation, from a dealer in Vienna. It cost me a fair sum, but it provided the final bridge necessary to finish my composition.”
“And how does it sound?”
Edmund shook his head. “I haven’t played it. At least not in full. The snippets I have played, though, sound unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. More powerful and more beautiful than any song I know.”
I slapped him on the back. “So you invited me to an unrehearsed performance? What a fine way to spend an evening.”
“You still fail to understand,” he scolded. “If the performance goes as planned, it will not simply create music. It will create a new creation.”
And here, my fear for Edmund grew. “Come now. Certainly you don’t believe that nonsense. Your father should have been jailed for filling you with such fairy tales.”
“The parts I have played,” he said, his voice soft now. “When I play, I feel something. In the very air, in the way the light of the room changes.” He paused. “I’ve been afraid to play it in full. That is why I asked you to come.”
“I love an odd song of course,” I said. “But I truly don’t believe any of what you’re saying.”
He nodded. “And that’s why I needed you to come. Because if I am slipping into madness, you are enough of a friend to say so and if I am not, you are credible enough as a skeptic to verify the outcome.” He hugged me, tighter than I expected, and I could feel the heat of his skin through his shirt, the sweat seeping through his jacket. “Will you please stay? Will you listen?”
“Of course,” I said. Edmund released me with a smile, his ever-present faith returning to his features.
“Thank you.” He took one of the chairs and set it beside the piano, just to the right of the small table holding his composition. I glanced at the pages; the arrangement of notes and the time signatures amazed me, using principles of theory I never considered. It struck me as playable, but incredibly complex.
Edmund took the bench and gathered a handful of pages from the stack, arranged them along the stand and checked the numbered corners to ensure the correct order. When he finished this initial procedure, he drew in a deep breath and readied his fingers on the keys. As he released the air from his lungs, I thought I heard a slight prayer cross his lips.
He began to play.
The music flowed, impossible in its arrangement, each successive note a turn from what the ear anticipated yet somehow free of discord, possessed of a subtle harmony. As the sound accumulated in the room, it took on a weight, growing in its presence until it felt almost tangible. I swore I felt it breaching past the drum of my ears and rolling into my thoughts, my senses. I could taste the strange harmony, metallic and sweet, and flashes of light and darkness rolled across my vision. I saw, in moments of clarity, Edmund sweating above the keys, his wrists and fingers stretching and snapping toward black and ivory with the grim purpose of hunting wolves.
I never realized Edmund was correct in his assertions. I simply knew, the way one knows themself for the first time, in the dawning moments of conscience.
Somewhere, in an unknown space hovering at the liminal edge of our senses, Edmund’s music was creating a universe. We felt the darkness spread out as a tossed sheet, the stars burning into existence and then dying, flinging out matter into this new universe. These cast-offs found stars of their own to orbit, forming planetary systems, moving in perfect order to Edmund’s onward march. I knew, by instinct, that my friend’s music would create life soon enough, riding the spark of a crescendo and slipping toward sublime consciousness.
And then I heard it, the long training of my ear overriding my rapture at the birth of this impossible thing. I heard the flaw. A missed note. A slip in the time signature. I noticed errors, increasing in number and severity. They screamed in my ears. Edmund could compose in the music of spheres, but he lacked the technical skill to adequately perform it.
I knew then, as certain as I knew the awesome power of Edmund’s piece and what it would certainly render, that each of these flaws would impact his creation, his universe. As each note crafted and gave rise to wonder, each flaw birthed suffering. As the pattern of the song gave rise to order, each slippage from its pattern sowed chaos.
And in the midst of these realizations, and the tragedy of the miracle around me, the question I had sought my entire life, unconscious of my need for it, finally came to me: Whom played a world so poorly?
Edmund, my dear friend, lost in the ecstasy of his work, never saw me reach for the lead-bottomed metronome. He failed to see it even as I rose from the chair and lifted it high above his head before slamming it down upon the crown of his skull with all my strength. Still in the hypnotic trance of the song, the blood seemed to flow golden across his scalp, a halo. I lifted the metronome and brought it down again, then again, then again, repeating the cycle until Edmund’s hands fell from the keyboard to twitch at his sides.
With Edmund dead, the song ceased. I could feel his creation no longer. Perhaps it burned out with the death of its creator. Perhaps it still exists, unfinished and unwrought. Either way, it would not suffer the flaws of its own creation, give rise to a race of souls doomed to misery.
I gathered the composition and put it in the trunk with the notebooks and tomes. Before I left the city for the last time, I doused it with kerosene and burned it on the edges of the dump, watching the pages curl and char and twist, no sound but the crackle and hiss of the flames. It was as perfect a song as I have ever heard.
3 For Halloween, Number 2: Tenure
Miskatonic University Tenure Application
Candidate: Dr. Gwendolyn Parrish
College: Arts and Letters
Department: Languages and Literature
Years of Service: 6 (5.5)
Education:
· Doctorate of Philosophy in Linguistic Anthropology, Cambridge University
o Dissertation: “Cross-Applications of Sanskrit in the study of Enochian Script”
· Masters of Arts in Classical Studies, Yale University
o Thesis: “Ur-Gods and Witchcraft in early Hebrew Scripture”
· Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies, Sara Lawrence
Publications:
· Symbolism in The Ryleh Rituals: The Patriarchal Roots of Cthulu Worship, Miskatonic Press.
· Germanic Influences on The Language of The Tcho-Tcho, Chicago University Press.
· “The Tentacles in The Column: Elder Thing Architectural Adornment in Roman Ruins”, Obscure Design: A Journal of Cryptic Architectures, Vol. 17, Issue 2.
· “Ritual Dagger Inscriptions: Where The Pen Meets The Sword”, Alternative Faiths Quarterly, Vol. 204, Issue 6.
· The Yellow Sign: A Critical Translation w/Annotations, Penguin.
· The Necronomicon: A New Translation for Beginners, Harvard University Press.
Service and Teaching (To Be Completed By Chair):
Dr. Gwendolyn Parrish joined The Languages and Literatures faculty immediately upon her matriculation from Cambridge University. Fresh from her stint abroad, we welcomed her back to the Northeast with open arms, and tasked her with translating a collection of scrolls retrieved from a jungle expedition undertaken in Peru by a member of the Archaeology faculty. Dr. Parrish completed the translations in less than a semester, complaining of little more than eye fatigue (unlike the members of the expedition). Her work stunned her colleagues, given that the vast majority of us could not recognize the symbols on the scrolls, let alone claim an understanding of how they might be deciphered.
In the Spring Semester, at the behest of the Dean, Dr. Parrish pledged as a member of The Silver Twilight Lodge, one of Arkham’s oldest social institutions. Despite concerns from the faculty that placing social obligations on the already demanding schedule of a tenure-track faculty member would cause undue burden, Dr. Parrish not only managed to enter The Silver Twilight Lodge but redoubled her scholarly efforts, spending any campus time free from classes or office hours in the reserved section of the University library. I assure you, here, that any stories you might have heard about chants and gurgling noises, as if something were welling up through the pipes of the building and into Dr. Parrish’s office, were nothing more than Dr. Parrish practicing her obligatory skit for the Lodge’s entry ceremony, a long standing tradition of the charming group.
In her second year, Dr. Parrish published a number of works, including two translations of classic texts of much interest to the faculty of Miskatonic. Prof. Heinrich Ballow, of the Religious Studies department, described her translation of The Necronomicon as nothing more than stunning, a text rivaling the crystalline towers of Kadath in its clarity and brilliance and thoroughly accessible to new initiates. Her translation of the classic play, The Yellow Sign, was found to be of such literary worth that The Arkham Players staged a complete version of the script in the early summer of that year, though the event was ultimately cancelled due to a series of small fires and an infestation of rats in the community playhouse. Please understand that the concerns of illness among the players, requiring institutionalization in three cases and hospitalization in another, resulted from over-indulgence and performer’s nerves.
In the third year of service, the University granted Dr. Parrish an unheard of opportunity to join an expedition to The Pacific Rim region arranged by the Biological Sciences department. After receiving reports of strange animals washing up on the shores of beaches in Thailand, Taiwan, China, Malaysia and Japan, shores known to possess ancient temples of unknown origin, Prof. Emmett Lake, head of Cryptid Zoology, insisted that a linguist accompany the traveling party on its year long journey. Dr. Parrish was selected due to an interest in the subject matter as well as a case of nerves surrounding the events with her play in the year prior, which we believed a long journey away from the confines of Arkham might subdue. Dr. Parrish returned with extensive notes and diagrams of the temples, as well as full translations of some of the etchings and carvings they contained. I am also happy to report that out of the original traveling group of seven, a miraculous four returned, which is significantly higher than our usual averages, as you know.
In year four, Dr. Parrish focused on teaching and scholarship, asking for a brief reprieve of service duties to the department and the college. Of course, as we know, this is not uncommon for our new faculty members after mid-tenure review.
In her fifth year, Dr. Parrish turned her attention toward a series of texts recently provided to the University upon the death of one Mr. A.C., whom we all know as a fine scholar but a gentleman of rather ill-repute. The texts, I am told, are one of a kind and originals. Dr. Richard Armitage, Head Librarian, requested Dr. Parrish specifically for the task, and supervised her work with his usual scrutinous eye. Strangely, upon completion of the project, Dr. Armitage reported to the department that he intended to limit Dr. Parrish’s access to the library’s special reserves for the foreseeable future. Dr. Parrish dismissed it as the result of an academic squabble between the two.
In her final year of the tenure process, upon returning from summer break and travels, Dr. Parrish told the faculty, at our first department meeting, that she intended to show us all great things in the coming year (the reports of cackling at this meeting were, I believe, more an effect of scholarly jealousies than any actual cackling on behalf of Dr. Parrish). Our newest faculty member spent much of the year in seclusion, emerging from her office rarely for food and rest. We applauded her for her serious efforts, and ensured her that pallid skin tones and bloodshot eyes are simply the manifest fears of a new faculty member approaching review, and encouraged her in her efforts. She did not fail to heed our advice.
As for the events of the winter solstice, I am certain I need say little as you have read the reports provided by Campus Police. Perhaps Dr. Parrish was found chanting naked in the quad, waving a sack full of bled goats about and wielding a machete, but we can hardly hold that against her, given her claim that she was simply expressing her religious beliefs. As for the carvings on the statue of Miskatonic’s founder, Dr. Parrish explained them as a form of graffiti art, all part of a performance to reassert the spiritual tradition of the wytch on a patriarchal figurehead. In regards to the reports of winged creatures and the stench of rot on the night breeze that evening, I am not one to speculate as I was in Boston attending a symphony. However, given our student’s tendencies to imbibe, I would suggest they saw little more than bats in search of the scant meals offered by winter nights and sniffed an ill-wind from the city landfill.
I fully recommend Dr. Gwendolyn Parrish receive tenure at Miskatonic University. I have spoken with the therapists and doctors coordinating her care, and they assure me she will be ready to resume her duties in the Fall Semester. I am also told her balance is improving despite the loss of her right eye, and the sloughing of her epidermis has all but come to an end. We expect great things from Dr. Parrish, and believe that the University should offer her its full support.
Oh, and in regards to teaching, her students find her knowledgeable, congenial and adept in pedagogy with the exception of the wasp vomiting incident of last October.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Whately
Professor of Literature
Chair of Arts and Letters
Miskatonic University
Decision (to be completed by President):
We grant Dr. Gwendolyn Parrish tenure at Miskatonic University pending the dismissal of any pending charges against her in a satisfactory fashion.
On a personal note, Ben, we need to look at lightening our workload expectations for new faculty. This is happening far too often.
************
3 For Halloween, Number 1: Cruel House
It took the kids. They knew it would.
The townspeople did their best, as always. Larry at the gas station told them they might try The Easy Zzzzs Lodge for the night. Margaret at the Café urged them to head on to lake, stay in some of the cabins near the Moonlight Club, spend their young night listening to music and dancing. Carol at Shop N’ Go flat out told them not to visit the house, even as she rang up the flashlights and batteries stacked on the cases of beer. Ben, her husband, told her the morning after that he wished he’d slashed their tires with the box knife he always kept in his pocket. Margaret slipped her arms around his waist and held him, hoping he could let it go.
In his darker moods, the Sheriff joked it was either the foolhardiness of youth or the house itself that made their well-intentioned concern, the concern of mothers and saints, ring superstitious and melodramatic. But no one in town blamed the kids. They knew the house had its ways, and those ways were cruel.
From their porches, they watched the sporty coupe ascend the hill below the mansion, pausing briefly at the iron gates the townspeople couldn’t lock, chain or even weld (Mickey from the garage hauled his torch up to the house once and spent twenty minutes on the hinges only to find them ice cold beneath his palm). As the sun set, they watched the old Tiffany lamps, fueled by something other than the electrical line they cut years ago, glow ecstatic in the windows, joining in the revelry of their guests, loud music on a portable stereo singing through the night. The party went on, and the spectators hoped the kids knew joy, that they believed in bright futures, warm families and content years before them. Most of the townspeople went to bed wishing this, and hoping, foolish, to awake to find their visitors at the café seeking coffee and pancakes to treat their hangovers.
The macabre ones, the penitent ones, stayed up, eyes affixed to the mansion’s silhouette, braced for the moment when the music stopped, the lights went out to give way to the white orbs of flashlights. One by one, those too vanished. The watchers never heard screams, never saw grim endings through the panes of windows, even those who dared to use binoculars or a telescope borrowed from a child’s bedroom. Perhaps the house, in a twisted fashion, respected its neighbors.
The next morning, Mickey drove the tow truck up to the house, lifted the coupe, and drove it down the hill. The first few times, the Sheriff preceded him, searching the house for the signs of struggle and death it didn’t contain. Nothing ever changed inside the house. The Sheriff no longer bothered with the drive. No one ever asked about the missing kids, and no one in town could ever seem to remember their names or the towns they came from. They remembered their faces.
No visitors came the next day, a quiet Sunday in October. Parents bought new nightlights for their children at Kendall’s Pharmacy, stocked up on sleep aids and Chamomile. The purchases went to waste.
Overnight, the house burnt to the ground. The townspeople woke on Monday to a view of the hill unobstructed by anything but charred embers against the slate-grey blue of the morning sky. Not even a hint of smoke lingered in the air to taint the fresh, earthen scent of leaves and impending rain.
The Fire Chief wrote the incident up as an unintentional accident, possibly the work of vagrants. No one would file an insurance claim. No one knew whom the house belonged to, if it belonged to anyone. In fact, no one could recall who built the house and when. They only knew its stories, collected unbidden as dust on an old book.
The rumor mill around town lay blame on a freak lighting strike (Maddie Fitch thought she head thunder in the night) or kids shooting bottle rockets through windows (though no one’s children ever approached the house; the children believed). Some even blamed a loose, lucky cigarette ember caught on the wind for igniting the house’s untended weeds.
Perhaps one of these stories is true, but perhaps not.
Perhaps the town council called a secret morning meeting, and spread the word among the townsfolk by word of mouth and anonymous phone calls. Perhaps a plan developed through whispers and text messages. Or, perhaps, the citizens simply knew to rise from their beds, rummage through drawers for old matches and lighters. Perhaps the decision to put on their shoes and gather plastic squeeze bottles of light fluid, half-filled cans of gas for stored lawnmowers and fast-burning logs for winter fireplaces seemed as natural to them as a glass of water or a trip to the bathroom.
Maybe, if someone had driven through town that night, some passerby, they would have locked their doors at the sight of hundreds of men and women, overcoats donned over bed clothes, walking the hill to the house, chatting and joking as if it were the Fourth of July, arms piled heavy with firewood and bundles of old newspaper.
Could one imagine Jonas Campbell, the town’s sole Scout Leader, guiding his former troop members on the best ways to stack the fuel, where to spread the accelerants for best effect?
Perhaps the Sheriff arrived in his squad car, the lights off, and took in the scene, the townsfolk silent, watching their feet. Maybe he said nothing as he took one of the road flares from his truck, tore its cap free, and tossed it at the house, the red casing twirling and spitting sparks into the darkness, his charges watching in the raptured joy of children on Christmas.
In the Fire Station, perhaps a probie ran for the alarm, only to feel the heavy hand of the Chief on his shoulder, a solemn smile etched on the old man’s face as he shook his head. The next morning, as the Chief walked the scene with clipboard, did he take any notes at all, or did he simply wipe away the imprints of sneakers and slippers in the ash with the soles of his heavy boots?
As the fire rioted through the house, could the townsfolk hear the screams of blistering timber, the shrieks of each pane of glass as they overheated and shattered? Did they hear the whispered curses of buckling floorboards and twisting bannisters? Perhaps it only drove them to gather more kindling from the collected debris in the yard, to feed the house’s atrocities to itself. Maybe they inched closer and closer to the flames, enjoying their purity, their brightness, their enchanting warmth.
And when the house, at last, fell in on itself, consumed, perhaps they bowed their heads with the tranquil joy of those freed from hard prisons after long years, and walked back to their homes and beds with a deep, abiding peace.
When the morning came, could one notice a brisk joy in their eyes, a swiftness in their steps? Did they smile a little more at the coworkers they greeted in the morning, at the people they saw on the streets? Could such a small change to their little town make such a difference?
Even now, maybe they sleep deeper and dream kinder. Perhaps they enjoy seeing strangers and visitors, their tongues light and unburdened by warnings and tales.
Maybe, from time to time, they wonder if the house will return, stronger and wiser, proofed against their flames. Perhaps they fear it will return to its perch above them, bringing with it all its ugliness and hunger.
Perhaps they do, but for now they rest. And gather kindling.