Authors: Autumn Christian
She still hadn’t spoken.
In the dark, her red hair didn’t lose its color. The rest of
her was dull and beaten. Her skin was sunburnt and covered in scars. God knows
where she got them. She had a slash on her throat leaking pus, infected
scratches. Her clothes were held together with pins and her ribs protruded from
slits in her shirt. But her hair was healthy and strong. Alive.
I should’ve driven her to a hospital. I should’ve asked her
where her parents lived and turned my car around. But my hands felt stuck to
the wheel. My neck felt bolted to the chair. I’ve never felt so out of control
before. I’m serious; you should’ve seen this bow. It had the curve of the moon
inside it. In the shadow of the night her face could’ve been anything, a lion’s
head, a flower’s center.
But I knew she was grinning.
“Stop,” she said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear her.
I never noticed how dark it was out there, beyond the
headlights of my car.
“Stop,” she said again. “I’ll get out here.”
I wanted to tell her there was nothing out there, that she
needed medical
attention, that
a girl her age
shouldn’t be carrying around a weapon that could take the head off a bear.
But I stopped the car.
She opened the car door. I knew she would go out there, into
the dark, beyond the headlights, and nobody would be able to save her.
“You’re very sick,” I said.
She climbed out of the car with her cat and her belongings.
Her hand lingered on the door handle, and her fingers quivered. I couldn’t see
her mouth, and it was if she spoke from her veined eyes.
“I know I’m sick,” she said, “but isn’t it kind of fun to be
damaged?”
IN
THE TIME I’D
been gone, my childhood home transformed into a charnel house.
My mother broke all the windows from the inside and placed rodent skulls on the
ledges. Roof shingles, smoked black, fell into the driveway.
The other homes in the neighborhood had long been abandoned,
FOR SALE signs staked into every lawn. Phaedra’s house suffocated underneath
crushing ivy, as if it’d been neglected for years. Not a single light remained
on the street.
Inside the lights flickered on.
When I went inside and saw her, I knew the mother who came
to me in the woods, was not the same mother who lived here. This was someone
older.
Someone who hadn’t felt sunlight in a long time.
She sat in the living room, in swaddling clothes, strips of
blankets and knitted quilts she’d ripped apart and stitched together, the
infant terrible, the mother cannibal.
Joseph, Mary and
savior.
Kali and Jezebel and stripper-whore.
She
was
all images of woman, superimposed
on each other
. She was the one who hung all my childhood memories on a
tree and wore my failures on her head like a barbed crown.
She untangled herself from the snarl of blankets and rose
toward me. How similar we were. In a few years, I’d look just like her, with
the dark tangled hair and the eyes of a bird, with her wasp skeleton and honey
skin.
“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” I said.
“Neither have you,” she said. “But your horns are growing in
nicely.”
She embraced me.
“Come upstairs.”
I brought my bag to my bedroom. The room was as I remembered
it. There was the mirror the demon once used to show me how I’d grown into a
woman, the macramé lamp I used to read under long after bedtime, the bed with
its dusty pink coverlet. I walked through the room, running my fingers across
everything.
“You’re not mad at me?” I asked my mother.
“I couldn’t be,” she said. “It’s time for you to get ready.”
I lay all of my things on the bed: the gazelle skull, my
dead-thing dress, and the hunter’s bow.
I undressed. Momma laced me into the dead-thing dress and
the spiders clutched my throat. She tied the skull mask into place, a black
ribbon at the back of my head. The bone pressed heavy into my face.
Oh Mother, how strong you could have been; the storyteller
and the goddess, instead of the divorcee who let her head fall into the sea.
You could have burned your fingers in hell and come out laughing. You could
have spit flame into the faces of the nurses who shoved you into paper
slippers. Instead, you scrubbed your teeth with bleach, bled into the sink, and
ran from window to window chasing The Nightcatcher who poisoned your brain.
Or maybe you knew she’d come for me all along and you had no
choice but to wait.
“The hush place,” I said, picking up my hunter’s bow,
“that’s where she is.”
Momma led me downstairs and out of the house into the dark.
The door snicked closed behind us.
We walked through the fields toward the river, the same
fields that Charlie and I once walked in summer heat. The dead-thing dress
clacked and tugged against my skin.
The Nightcatcher tread behind us with bare feet and wherever
she crushed the grass, it never grew again.
“I may not part with her,” she said to me. “I may not give
her up for anything.
I felt stifled and hot underneath the gazelle skull mask. My
horns bled.
“I want a new pet, and she’s so sweet. She was born to be
sweet,” The Nightcatcher said.
I kept walking, hands balled into fists, my face burning.
“I could make her serve me forever,” she said, “make her
kneel. I’d be good to her. She’d learn to love it.”
I snarled. It was a sound I’d never heard come from me
before, a wet and throaty animal sound.
“She’s mine!” I said,
I stopped. When I looked behind me, The Nightcatcher was
gone and there were about half a dozen deer a few feet away from me. More were
coming out of the fog, tiptoeing gently, like hobbled women.
“Look, darling,” Momma said. “Those deer have your eyes.”
I held my hand out to the deer. I opened my mouth to speak
to them.
Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.
The deer tiptoed forward and a small fawn reached out to
nuzzle my hand. Her nose blue velvet, her eyes,
demon
eyes. Through the corner of her mouth I saw the glint of fangs.
My shoes fell apart in the grass, and my feet cracked apart.
From the skin of my pale feet emerged newborn hooves, three pronged and black.
(Once I was a girl.)
And I felt my horns spiraling from my head.
(But I scratched and scratched.)
My face melting into the mask of bone.
(Scratched and scratched.)
My spine tearing my back, lapping at the
back of my head.
Until I was a girl no more.
Not a transformation, but a revealing.
The deer followed us to the river where Charlie once jumped,
and never resurfaced.
“I had so many questions for you,” I said to Momma as I
stood at the edge of the bridge overlooking the water, “but I can’t remember
now. And I’m not sure they ever mattered.”
My mother, with the bird nest in her hair,
smiled, and her fingers stiffened around her throat.
I looked into the water below. Turgid waters.
Water with teeth.
I hesitated, took a step back, and heard
the rustle of the deer stepping backwards with me.
“It’s not too late,” she said. “You could still turn
around.”
“Mother,” I said.
I turned back to the waters kicking up froth. I gripped the
hunter’s bow in both hands and stepped onto the side of the bridge.
“Mommy, I love her.”
I jumped down.
I
HIT THE WATER
and plunged downwards. I held tight to the hunter’s bow. My
lungs burned. The water grew murkier and murkier until starlight couldn’t reach
me.
I fell into a cave below the river. I gasped, inhaling a
rush of oxygen. It was a cave where the walls whispered, quivering like a womb.
The hush place.
It was a network of
ancient tunnels. The town must’ve been built on top of them.
The Nightcatcher must’ve used these tunnels to appear
wherever she wanted; at my mother's window to torment her with poison, to
whisper like a river in my ear when I couldn’t sleep, to crawl into a meadow to
set a trap for my demon and me.
I got to my feet.
The ceiling rose a hundred feet above
me,
made of suspended, boiling water. No going back. Yet, there were so many
tunnels leading in every direction; I didn’t know which way to start walking.
I stood still for several moments, trying to slow my
breathing and to make sure I hadn’t actually died on the way down, as I tried
figure out which way to go. There had to be some clue, some marking,
some
whispering, godlike voice, to lead me in the right
direction. If only I could find, on the floor, a single spider.
One of the demon’s spiders.
I’d recognize them anywhere.
But there were no spiders.
Then a child’s silhouette stood up in the darkness. I
couldn’t see his face or any of his features masked in the shadows, but I knew
he hadn’t slept in years. I recognized his frail shaking, the twitch gap-stop
of his motions. He dripped water as he approached me.
I crouched down so we were eye to eye and I saw his bloated,
waterlogged face. Red liquid smeared his chin. Blood, I thought at first.
But no, it was the juice of pomegranate seeds.
He held his hand out to me, also smeared in red. I slung the
hunter’s bow over my back.
Charlie led me through the tunnels.
The air, moist and hot, made it difficult to breathe. It
felt like being buried underneath a volcano. Sometimes bright light streaked
the tunnels and I could see the walls scratched and marked with the same
symbols The Witch drew on the walls and carved on her skin.
Protection symbols, maybe.
Or maybe something transcribed to The Witch in sleeping
hours, or written down in a gold-embossed tome of spells to soften the lie. The
words became sigils so that the writer would forget, but the sigils never
forgot.
Charlie and I walked like two dreamers, like fourteen year
children, almost too nervous to hold hands. He stumbled, sleep-drunk, and on
his bare shoulders I saw the scars of whip marks he’d once inflicted on
himself.
Did he look at the walls and see his own broken future?
Or did he see my history etched on the walls, the
golden-haired huntress with the deer lying down to sleep in my lap, the
hunter’s bow played like a violin? Did he see the girl with a shadow that
breathed on the back of her neck, and a mother who ground herbs into a poultice
that, if eaten, could scratch the surface of the universe away?
I saw Wormwood.
Wormwood, the walls said.
Your origin and
your epitaph.
The ambrosia flower that could make you
into a goddess, or the living dead.
Wormwood. It’s sweet on the back of
the tongue.
We came to a long hallway where moss grew on stone tiles
underneath us. I noticed child footprints, sunk into the moss, crushed and
faded brown, as if he’d walked here many times before. Without looking, Charlie
stepped into the imprints.
“Do you know how long you’ve been down here?” I asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” he said. “But now
you’re here, and it’s like I never waited at all.”
I followed in his footsteps. My hooves were smaller than his
child’s feet.
“Did you get the cigarette?” I asked, and I laughed, because
it seemed such a trivial question.
“Yes,” he said. “When you threw it down to me, I saw your
face reflected in the water. You were so far away. I wanted to reach out and
tell you not to worry about me. But she reached out for you instead.”
She.
“I burned her,” he said in his quiet, shredded voice, “with
your cigarette. The entire river boiled. She cried out and sank back down into
the darkness, and she could not grab you.”
“Did she hurt you?” I whispered.
“She couldn’t,” Charlie said. “And I’m not the one she wants
to hurt.”
“I wish I could have found your teddy bear for you.”
“I don’t miss him. I have lost more than that.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t jump into the water after you.”
He turned to me. Shadows coiled around his arms. He wiped at
his mouth with his free hand, but the pomegranate stain wouldn’t go away.
He grasped my hands.
“I will never forgive you,” he said. “Because I have nothing
to forgive you for.”
“I was scared. I should have jumped in after you,” I said.
“Then you wouldn’t be here with me now.
In
this moment.
And I wouldn’t give up this moment for anything else.”
He kept leading me forward, and as he did, she spoke to me
through the walls.
“Lily.
“I’ve got a little something for you. Can you guess what it
is?
“It’s got two arms and two legs, and can walk backwards on
its hands. It eats cat’s eyes and dead birds.
“It’s a rotten thing.
I wouldn’t touch it
,
you’ll get diseases
.
“If it gives me one wrong look I’ll break every bone in its
is face.”
If walls could’ve smiled, they would’ve smiled with
black-winged teeth, with her mocking, sharp tongue. My jaw and brain rattled.
The walls pressed closer.
“How much further?” I asked Charlie.
“This way.”
The fog rolled in at our feet, and rolled back.
We entered a brass atrium. Tunnels branched off in several
directions, spiraling outward. Built into the center of the room was a dry,
brass fountain. I leaned over the edge.
At the bottom of the fountain lay old coins, covered in dust.
Greek, maybe.
Or older.