She Walks in Shadows (5 page)

He turned to the little spoons tucked into the little chipped serving dishes, her meek attempts to ward off sadness. “Why aren’t we eating our corn? Wasn’t that the whole point of moving out here?” She thought they’d ruled out subsistence years ago. “Growing our own food? Living off our own land? Unless you think there’s something wrong with it. You and Pierce.”

She waited until after the boys were in bed, and she had promised Merrill that they would put up lost-and-found flyers all over town, to say something to Nate. That was how long it took to sculpt the nauseous worry in her heart into something spear-shaped. She lingered at the top of the staircase, rehearsing her words —
Did something happen to the dogs last night
or
I found something in the well —
when Nate rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs and started laboriously climbing up.

“What happened to the dogs?” came stammering out when he reached the second floor.

He sighed loudly. She willed herself not to apologize. “They ran away. Like I said.”

“But I found them in the well.”

Nate’s red eyes finally focused on her. Her poor husband was so horrified — so honest-to-the-bones horrified — by this revelation that he grabbed her by the arm, saying he needed to explain something to her —
explain
— then pulled the string on the door to the attic to drag her up into that spider-webbed lair of things unwanted, things unexplained. He pushed her down toward the boxes of books that they’d never bothered to cut open after the move and descended the ladder again, slamming the door shut behind him as she lay shaking in a cloud of dust.

At the very beginning, she was relieved to be alone. The dark erased everything that taunted her in the light — the carved-up acres of a burned and spent, uniform earth; the harrowing passage of time. She made believe that she was nothing but a set of lungs, expanding and shrinking. She curled up near the door with her palm against the cold wood and slept.

But when sunlight leaked in through the tiny attic window and the attic door was still closed, the muscles around her ribs started to cramp. She tried pounding her fist and then a flashlight against the attic floor. She tried shouting — first at Nate, then at Teddy, then at Zeke. She avoided yelling Merrill’s name until she had no choice. The boys’ voices seemed so quiet, like they were many islands away across a great sea.

But someone was moving down there below the attic door. She tried everything to talk to it. “Nate?” she called. “Nate, please listen to me. Nate, I love you.” When that got no response she started to scream — complicated accusations about his failure as a pharmaceutical sales supervisor and his need to maintain a sense of moral superiority that degenerated into words that degenerated into noise. She chewed off the tips of her nails; she dragged her fingers through her hair so many times that strands began to come off in her fist.

And then, after the sky’s white-blue started turning to pewter, the door swung open. She was slow crawling toward it, but it was Teddy. Teddy, her wonder. Her savior. The only boy they’d named after a president. “Come quick,” he whispered. “Daddy’s in the field.”

It did not work. Nate must have been waiting downstairs, because she woke up back in the attic with a welt and a throbbing pain in the back of her head. She resumed screaming because now the attic was drenched in fading amber half-light and that meant she had been locked in that room for almost an entire day. A child’s voice screamed back at her from somewhere on the second floor. The
“Mom”
dragged like a serrated knife through the wood and the insulation, and she realized it was Teddy. He shouted something about
“Dad”
and
“crazy”
and
“room,”
and she thought at first that he was talking about her plight, but no. Nate had locked him in the spare bedroom, the one they saved for family — family that never visited.

She told Teddy to apologize to Nate. She told him to ask Zeke for help. But in the end, all she could do was press herself flat against the floor and sing, “I love you. A bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.”

That night, she stacked up broken furniture underneath the attic window and tried to signal Ambrose with the flashlight. His truck was hurtling by ten miles over the speed limit; he was probably on his way back from Cellar’s Bar and Grill, and he was probably rushing home for another, but she didn’t have a choice. She switched the flashlight on and off, on, off, on, off until his red tail lights disappeared behind the cottonwoods. Had the truck slowed? It hadn’t stopped.

When the attic door was pushed open, she had to bite her knuckle to keep from calling Ambrose’s name.

“You have to let the boys go,” she said. She could not see Nate’s expression, but his face had been a dark blank to her for months now. That light from the sky had come and eaten all the color off his face — all the variegation, the jokes he’d told her, the promises he’d made her. Every time he had shown her what a good father he was. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll help you through this, but you need to let someone else take care of them for a while.”

“I need you to prove your loyalty to me, Abby. You and Teddy both.” He pushed a cob of their corn — tiny shriveled kernels bounded their grotesquely swollen cousins like rings of baby teeth — toward her on a paper plate. The big, awful kernels looked like unblinking eyes. “Please eat it. Please show me I’m not wrong.”

She picked out a little tooth-kernel and tucked it down between her lip and her gum. It immediately dissolved and filled her mouth with something that melted like pixy stix, something that tasted like bloody soap. “Let them go stay with my sister.”

He nudged the plate with the long barrel of his gun. “More.”

So, she ate more, but Teddy must not have, because his little voice dwindled to nothing but a whisper that Abigail eventually realized was her own ragged breath, tearing in and out.

It took Merrill hours that might have been days to speak to her. He would only push the door open by an inch. She crawled toward him in the dark, chewing another kernel — she was hoping they were poisoning her and was taking the fact that she couldn’t feel her legs anymore as a good sign. “We have to be quiet so Daddy doesn’t get mad,” he whispered. Pale-blue eyes rolled down toward the light. “Teddy won’t come out of that room.”

“I know,” she said. “Listen, baby. You gotta tell your daddy that you’re going to the well. Tell him you’re going to get water and then go to Mr. Pierce’s, okay? Go. I love you.”

Pale-blue eyes blinked, very slowly. In between, she saw her little boy smiling, crying, sleeping, dead. A great many colors passing so quickly they were all bleeding together into one monstrous, endless whole.

When Abigail woke it was day. Rainbow sunlight filled the room with glitter, though she wore a cloak of shadow. The attic door was open and Ambrose was clambering up to see her. “Abby? Abby, are you in here?” He sighed green-mint toothpaste. “You’re okay, now. Nate’s downstairs; he’s messed up bad. I don’t think he can move. I don’t know what’s happened to him, he … I think he needs a doctor. I can’t find … any of the boys.”

She started to take off the shadow-cloak. The light started to touch the old useless leather skin she could no longer feel. Her hair wrapped around the sun and started to burn.

“Abby? Honey?”

The shadow-cloak pooled around the stumps that had once held her feet. All her cells looked at Ambrose, waiting to be embraced, but when his eyes and only his eyes looked back at her, they wept with horror and hatred, and he shot her with his unseeing fingers that cradled the gun like a baby. The pain was not a pain but a liberation. She rose as Ambrose fell, rose all the way to the ceiling and blossomed like a flower, filling the house’s every nook. She saw Nate on the couch, dying and then dead and still shuddering, pieces of his mortal coil stubbornly struggling along on the floor. But he was fractured; she was whole.

The walls of the house peeled open like an onion for Abigail. Outside, the well was beating like a brilliant magenta heart, a small nuclear star. The boys were inside with the dogs; they were all waving to her. The many-splendored light was in there, too, curling and coiling as it prepared to spring-board off this world and into the next. It wrapped her in electric seaweed tendrils and promised her oceans. It promised her color. But when the boys weren’t broken down into simpler matter, they were saying, “Mama,” and for them, she floated down. Crimson and indigo and violet, for violence.

DE DEABUS MINORIBUS EXTERIORIS THEOMAGICAE

Jilly Dreadful

De Deabus Minoribus Exterioris Theomagicae
: Textual Criticism and Notes on the Book as Object, A Bibliographic Study by Donna Morgan, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, Miskatonic University

Reproduction of Title Page:

de deabus minoribus exterioris theomagicae:

A Diʃcourʃe on the Invocations of

the Lesser Outer Goddesses;

Grounded in her Creator’s Proto-

Chimiʃtry, and verifi’d by a practicall

Examination of Principles in the Greater Dimension.

By Septimia Prinn

The Voice of Idh-yaa:

She was a woman

with a tome.

Zoroaʃter in Oracul.
(Zoroaster in Oracle.)

Audi Ignis Vocem.
(Listen to the Fire)

(handwritten Elizabeth Breedlove)

LONDON,

Printed by E.B For H. Vondrak at the

Castle in Thorn-hill. 1650.

Binding:

1. 3”x5” in size.
   
2. Octavo binding (eight leaves per quire).
   
   1. Never seen an octavo so small; generally duodecimos are this size because of the folding of paper.
      
3. No evidence of rebinding; most likely not forgery; provenance unknown.
   
   1. Binding is intact but well-worn from frequent use.
      
   2. Cover in serviceable condition; leather is visibly weathered from repeated handling; dirty (oils from hands depositing in leather).
      
      1. Threads on back cover, where binding meets book structure, are raised; thick thread looks like “skeletal fingers” binding quires to cover.
         
      2. Upon closer inspection, “skeletal fingers” are not just abnormally thick twine bindings; appear to be bound with articulated bones, with thread carefully sewn through the bone connecting binding to cover.
         
      3. Judging from shape and lightness of bones, I suspect they are wings from a single bat; search on library databases suggest that this technique has not been seen before; email sent to Professor Dane to confirm.
         
         1. A headache is forming with intense pressure behind eyes; artificial light in Special Collections is becoming painful.
            
4. Considering occult subject matter of text, small size, slim width: Binding suggests it was designed with secrecy in mind; could easily be concealed on body.
   
   1. I postulate this was a practicing occultist’s grimoire.
      

Paper:

1. This octavo is printed exclusively on vellum, still pungent.
   
   1. Vellum most likely made of pigskin, although this does not have the same color or scent as the vellum commonly sourced in London during this era; perhaps chemically treated to achieve a whiter transparency, hence the remnant smell; possibly sheepskin.
      
2. On page 50, quire E, on the 7th leaf, on the face of one of the only decorative plates in the book, an illustration, beneath which these handwritten words appear (Translations are my own):
   

   Idh-yaa Lythalia Vhuzompha
   

   Shub-Niggurath Yaghni Yidhra
   (names of lesser outer goddesses)
   

   Dare licentiam ad ut eam in servitium vestrum arma capere milites,
   (Give her permission to arm soldiers in your service.)
   

   Septimia Prinn
   (proper name of author)
   

   Deas à Conciliis, & Oracul Indiciarius,
   (Goddess’ Council & Indicarius (?) of the Oracle)
   

   DoƸtor Utriusque Naturam & Diⱴinam.
   (Doctor of Both Natural Laws & Divine)
   

3. At this site, a discoloration on the page. A watermark, perhaps; appears to be lettering.
   
   1. Not aware of watermarks in this period using words instead of symbols.
      
   2. Asked for a cold (fiber optic) light, but Carlo, the Special Collections librarian, claims they do not have one.
      
      1. Certain I used one in Special Collections earlier this week.
         
   1. Carlo provides me with table lamp.
      
      1. Why is Carlo keeping the cold light from me?
         
4. Place watermarked leaf over table light, but nothing lights up beneath, meaning it is embossed.
   

   a. Hold book at eye level, single leaf against overhead lights, read aloud: “
   Eram quod es; eris quod sum.”
   (I was what you are; you will be what I am.)
   

5. The book features deckled edges and is adorned with heavy speckling, most likely quill ink; the speckles are a brown, sepia tone.
   
   1. Quill ink generally made with iron in this era, which oxidizes over time; same color of oxidization is on edges, as well as the handwritten portions of the text.
      
   2. As Special Collections closed for the day, I placed tome on dissertation cart.
      
      1. Somehow tome ended up in my bag.
         
      2. Will continue textual analysis at home; will return text to cart tomorrow.
         
6. The vellum is desiccated, making the edges of each page razor sharp.
   
   1. Slit tip of thumb as I turned a page.
      
      1. Kind of cut that’s so deep it doesn’t bleed right away and looks as though the skin never separated.
         
   2. Turned page, left bloody thumbprint.
      
      1. Went to get cotton swab and peroxide to lift stain out.
         
         1. Blood is gone.