Arcane II (19 page)

My husband knelt down before me like a supplicant knight and rested his head in the flat cradle of my hips, directly above the rise of my sex. It should have been embarrassing, and for a moment it was and I could not think what to do with my arms, save hold them stiffly out from me. But then it was as if some strange fairy magic had descended upon the two of us. I was transfixed, shot through and stuck fast to the floor. The world narrowed to the shivering of my husband’s sweat-slicked hair moving gently, like wind, like breath, against the skin of my abdomen. I rested my hands atop his head, he drew his own arms up to encircle my waist. Gooseflesh erupted on my legs.

My husband took my maiden head, so long guarded and treasured and reserved, leaning awkwardly against the sleek grand piano. Stricken keys played a discordant, repetitive tune underneath us. It hurt and I braced myself, hardening my body against him.

He wept into my neck the entire time.

At last, he collapsed against me like sickly child and I supposed that he must be finished. I could think of nothing to do but to smooth his hair with my fingers and shush him kindly, the way own mother used to do for me when I would struggle with nightmares. Between my legs, there was a dull pressure. I wanted to curl up small and tight, collect all the pieces of myself and press them back into place.

“Donielle,” he called me. This is not my name.

I laid alone in our bed that night, and regarded the little scattering of blood on the white of my dress. It was less than I expected and it was already drying brown. Such a small thing, all of this.

Part Five: The Pianist’s Wives

My husband had been thrice-married when first we met. His first wife fell into a fast-raging river and could not be saved. His second wife suffered a terrible sickness that had her coughing up blood and bits of her insides as she died. His third wife tumbled down the long staircase that leads to the ballroom and broke her neck at the bottom.

He keeps no pictures of these women in the house. No articles of clothing, long-lost jewelry, letters, books. They slid off of this place like water, the last hints of their presence evaporating in the sun.

You tell me: It is not good luck to be anyone’s fourth wife. I know. I knew it when I first saw my husband.

But I am more than twenty-eight years old. And, as my mother never allowed me to forget: we are not actually rich, only well-dressed.

***

Is it possible to have dreams without sleep?

I have no recollection of closing my eyes, no memory of rest, but I have... nightmares, I think. In them, I awake in a cloud of my own blood. It rushes forth from between my legs, such a bright red that it must come from the very heart of me. And, in my dream, I know that I will die. That this terrible blood-letting will kill me.

Even when I awake, the fear does not subside.

***

Two things: my monthlies have ceased. My stomach is flat. There is no appreciable difference in my body, in my brain, but I’ve not bled for two months.

And I found a drop of blood on the floor outside my bedroom. It was fat and perfectly round, like a drop of red rain.

I cleaned it myself, but it came back the next day.

***

I thought it was coming from me, I thought it was coming from inside of me, from between my legs where he doesn’t touch me, save the once. Just once. Is once enough?

The bathwater smelled like lavender but then... then like copper. Like coins. At first, the red made a pretty composition, floating and twining through the warm, milky water. It looked like a girl’s hair-ribbon, caught in a high wind.

Oh, but there was so much of it. I thought, at first, that I might yet be dreaming. But my skin was cold where, wet, I had raised myself out of the bathtub.

I screamed. The water smashed against the porcelain sides of the bathtub as I scrambled out. It slopped out on to the floor, a pink puddle. I slipped and hit the tiled floor with my knee. I opened up my elbow on a wooden cabinet. No one had heard me scream. Even if they had, they would not come for me. Bruised and bleeding, I pressed myself to the floor like an animal. Everything hurt, everything vibrated as if the whole of my body had tensed to flee.

There was nothing between my legs. I was clean, and the bathtub was filled with a solid red.

***

That was the night the knocking stopped.

The silence was worse.

***

Today, I found an axe deep in my husband’s root cellar.

I took it to the keyless room.

There is a girl in that room. Her name was Donielle, she was pretty, with yellow hair, like my husband’s. There are photographs, so many photographs of her. Donielle at the shore, Donielle sitting stiffly like a doll, Donielle riding a horse, Donielle at her piano. Several of her at the piano. They are hung on the walls and piled three deep on every surface. One is no doubt the very one missing from the parlor downstairs.

Once, there must have been much of Donielle in this house. There are little leather-bound books filled with her essays in English and French and Latin. There are piles of sheet music, the hand that scribbled on them the same one that wrote out those long, perfect French sentences. I imagined my husband’s long-dead mother, wandering through the caverns of her bleak home, subtracting her daughter from walls and tables and beds, until it was as though she had never been at all.

The whole place is full of dead flowers that smell like nothing but dust and carry no memory of sweetness or color or the summertime. The paper notice of her death has a prayer and somber angel on it. God welcomed her into his heaven, it says, almost twenty-three years ago. She was nineteen years old, my husband’s only sister.

I stared for a very long time at one picture in particular, another of her at the piano. Her face was bent towards the keys, her shoulders set with concentration. Her mouth was slightly open, as if caught in a frenzy of creation. She did not appear to realize that a picture was being taken at all.

It was that photograph that I took to my husband.

***

My husband did not lock the door. I opened it, and this is what I found:

He sat like some austere water bird, hunched over the piano’s keys. His hair was dark with sweat. How was it that he could always be a-fever? How was it that his brain did not burn? His hands banged haphazardly against the piano, like an insolent child. And, like a faithful but unyielding teacher, she stood tall and white next to him and rested her long fingers on the back of his neck. His skin where she touched it was colorless as bone, her flesh leeching the color from his.

Donielle’s hair was no longer blonde, and her face was no longer lovely. She wore a long white dress, like a wedding dress or a shroud. It sagged against her lower body with the weight of her blood, still wet. I could see the little movements of her legs against the soaked fabric. It made rivulets down her legs, collected on her bare feet. How long had she been standing there? Long enough to make a puddle all around her feet. Surely there was not so much blood in any one creature.

Donielle heard me, she turned her face to me. Her eyes were filmy blue, blind and useless as marbles. But still Donielle saw me and she smiled. And then she leaned down to whisper in her brother’s ear, still smiling, still so gentle. Her fingernails were long and there was dirt underneath them and they went
tap tap tap
on the piano’s shining lid.

All this time I could not move and as I watched my husband’s back stiffen, I felt my bladder let go and warm wetness streamed down the insides of my legs. My hands were tight and stiff on the photograph I had found. I held it in front of me like a talisman.

My husband turned to face me and he was crying a child’s ceaseless tears. They made his waxen flesh shine. “Oh no,” he moaned, standing up from the piano bench. “Oh no, you can’t... you can’t... it was my fault.” He lurched towards me across the floor, his limbs sluggish and unwieldy, as though he was fighting his way to me through deep water. “We can’t. We have to undo it, Donielle.”

And still I did not move, could not move. As on that night when he took my virginity, I found myself hypnotized by my husband. He looked at me with his eaten-up eyes. “You can’t,” he said, and suddenly the tremor had gone from his voice. He stood up straighter, like a soldier, like a gentleman. The way he had looked that first day I had met him, when I was just a girl, smiling and pastel-colored and admiring the fine view from his windows. He looked at me sternly, like a child that had disobeyed him. “Donielle, it is a sin. You’ve got to get that thing out of you.”

“Perhaps it is our punishment,” the smiling creature at the piano whispered, her lips barely moving.

“No,” he said, and his eyes seemed to look through me entirely. “It’s our secret. It‘s got to be our secret, Doni.” He stepped towards me. His eyes lit up, a flame interior. “Doni, I think I can fix it. I think I can make everything good again.”

That is when I began to run.

I could hear her, she was playing the piano and singing to herself. I could hear him, he was running after me and he was gaining. His footfalls made a staccato music of their own. The song she played was almost finished now. No doubt it was time for a new project, a new composition and a new bride.

In that moment, I remembered what my mother had told me on the morning of my wedding, as I tarried before my mirror and attempted once more to understand what I saw reflected there. “Think what it will be like,” she had said, “to live in a house full of music!”

I climb the stairs, my damped skirts slapping at my legs. My husband chases me, but I am faster and I am cleverer. There is a room up there, you see. With a girl and a sharp axe inside it.

Nightcrawlers

Jean Graham

We’re hungry.

Our little friend Madelyn hasn’t fed us in eight long days and nights. We really must have a heart-to-heart talk with that girl.

Oh, we’ve heard her up there, turning tricks—four and five in an evening—every night of the week. One in ten of those tricks is supposed to be ours.

That’s the arrangement.

Two sets of shiny red eyes stare back at me from the dim basement shadows. Spark’s nose twitches and Servia’s large round ears stand up.

“Slashhh!” Servia hisses my name through her long rat’s teeth. “She’s coming!”

All our ears stand up now. Rat shape is best for listening, best all around for living in the lovely mold-infested cellars under all these decrepit old row houses. We hear the sharp report of approaching footsteps on the sidewalk out front, then voices, laughter, and the familiar sound of the front door creaking open.

Our host has arrived home.

“It’s just through here,” Madelyn’s alcohol-slurred voice announces, and now the footsteps come toward
our
door. The three of us huddle together in anticipation, trebled hunger waiting in the dark.

“Wha-at?” a drunken male voice drawls as the key turns and the cellar door eases open, sending shafts of pale lamplight stabbing down the stairs. “You mean you do it in the basement? Ma-an oh man, you are sure one hell of a kinky little broad.”

Madelyn lets him start down the stairs, but as usual, she hangs back in the doorway. That’s the moment when Servia takes her human shape and steps out of the shadows to confront the meal. His bloodshot eyes widen in leering anticipation—that’s because Servia never bothers with clothing when she takes mortal form—and he stumbles toward her. His lewd remark is only half-uttered when her arms enfold him and her sharp teeth find his jugular vein.

Still rat-shaped, Spark and I race each other to the dinner’s feet. We each choose a leg, scurry over soiled shoes and up the dirty white socks until at last we reach our own richly veined feast.

Ecstasy!

Lost in the euphoria of feeding, I scarcely hear the door close, the key turn. I do manage to make a mental note, though, to have a chat with our human friend for the purpose of learning why our dinner came so late. It can wait, though. It will have to, because the blood is only the barest beginning of our feast.

With the meal now drained and prostrate on the cellar floor, we proceed to our true purpose—the one for which we walk the earth in the first place—extracting the mortal’s soul.

I crawl onto the mark’s chest and place all four of my bloodied paws above his unbeating heart. Spark joins me there, and Servia rests one of her human-shaped hands close beside us. Together, we call forth a thing that belongs, by its owner’s own design, to our realm. (The fact that he never believed in us, or for that matter believed that he had a soul at all, is, of course, irrelevant to the issue.) It emerges, that precious commodity, a bulbous, gray and writhing thing that rests for a moment in Servia’s hand. And in that moment, we three feed yet again—this time on the sweet nectars of greed and gluttony, anger and envy, pride and sloth, lust, larceny and (yes!) murder—all the very juiciest of deadly mortal sins.

Ambrosia!

Leeched of all its delectable corruptions, the soul lies desiccated and twitching in Servia’s outstretched palm. It shrieks a final, feeble protest when we send it oozing down to its ultimate reward in the nether realms. Then, and only then, are we truly, wholly satisfied.

Then, and only then, we sleep.

It’s much too easy to lose track of time after feeding. So when the cellar door is opened once again, I am not at all certain how many hours have passed. Our sated trio, rats again all, rouses to Madelyn’s footsteps on the landing. She comes
clumping
down the wooden stairs still dressed in her working clothes: short shorts, fishnet stockings, platform shoes. When she reaches the earthen floor, she makes a face at the john’s drained corpse lying there face up, its surprised eyes fixed and staring vacantly at the ceiling above.