Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (56 page)

Perplexed, she looked again at Paul’s brown eyes. What was it she was trying to remember? Someone who had appeared in the shadows of the underwater world, like an embodied desire from her subconscious, who had not made it to the surface with her. But her mind was so flooded with the joy of waking that she had lost hold of something…She struggled to remember…

There was a part in this drama for a handsome prince, and here he was, Paul, waiting for her. But somehow, this version of the fairy tale didn’t ring true. It was as if someone had given her a rose without any thorns. It didn’t quite seem real.

In that dreamlike moment, Paul stepped forward and spoke quietly to Donna, who shook her head as the policeman unlocked her handcuffs. Another officer freed Alex, who also seemed to be uneasily looking around.

So it wasn’t only she who sensed that someone had missed his cue. A faintness began to come over her as she tried to sort this out, and she swayed. Kateri put an arm around her protectively. “Do you want to sit down?”  But Rose pushed aside her discomfort, and embraced her friend, then Alex, Paul, and even Donna in turn, all the while wondering at what was lacking.

She was awake, indeed. Who had brought about this miracle? How had she gone from hovering on the borders of death to this life? Looking back over her shoulder into the mists, she could remember only groping words, and a mythical figure, from some murky past, emerging from the shadows of time, not as a golden god, but a slight, twisted shape with dark shadows chasing him, who had touched her inner being and left a luminous kiss upon her lips.

She touched her lips. It had been done by a kiss, she realized. There had been a love that had entered into her life in secret, when she lay in darkness, which had moved away, on some lonely errand. But she could feel the warmth on her mouth and in her soul. She was changed now—she had fallen asleep as a girl and awakened as a woman. Who had changed her? Who had she been before? And who was she now?

And like a tide, all of her past history began to gather beneath her and rose up suddenly like a wave and crashed about her, flooding her memory with life and remembrance of everything that had come before the accident—her childhood, family, fears, loves, adventures, and the day of the accident, the ladder hovering on the edge of the barn loft before crashing down, the rope coiled at the bottom, waiting to strike.

And she remembered now that there had been a woman, who had been there witnessing it all. Responsible for it all.

As if it was the time for the final entrance of the villain, she heard a door opening, and turned to meet the newcomer, a feeling of dread and assurance coming over her at once.

The woman stood in front of the door to Graceton Hall, the door swinging shut slowly behind her. But she too had changed. No longer a detached and observant serpent-shadow, but the shell of something that had once been human. Her hair was nearly white, and her eyes were empty wells.

“It was you,” Rose said to her slowly, her hand on her throat. “You pushed me from the loft and I fell.”

The woman recognized her and flinched. Then after a long struggle, she shook her head.

“No,” she said with an effort as though speaking to a ghost. “I tried to catch you.”

Rose struggled over the mountains of darkness in her mind swiftly. “But you drugged me. You kept me a prisoner. Why?”

The woman’s mouth quivered and her jaw slackened. “I was afraid,” she said, her breath barely coming.

And in Rose’s mind the myths of the dark castle were binding themselves to everyday realities with a deft quickness. If the serpent in the castle was in reality Dr. Murray, then the dark figure who had rescued her was...

“Fish,” Rose said, because now she remembered, and a warmth and a fear came over her simultaneously. “Where is he?”

There was a murmur behind her of confusion, but the haunted woman in front of her stared, and answered as though she had seen it happen before, long ago and far away,

“He’s burning.”

H
IS

Blackness mixed with fire.

Pain mixed with growing nothingness.

Blood, and the void.

...Fire all about, and fire within.

...fire in his heart...

...A worm and no man am I

Despised by all...

...and we are tried as though by fire ...

…Why do you turn away your face?

I am as one that goes down to the pit…

...Where the worm dies not

and the flame goes not out…

...Life’s a poor tale told by an idiot

signifying nothing...

...The love that makes me go about like this in pain...

... when they ask where he has gone,

what shall you say?

He has gone to the dark places beneath the world,

to the fires within the earth.

Hers

Rose plunged into the darkness again, this time with a borrowed coat clenched around her, her bare feet racing on the gravel towards the car. In that hour, she noticed, no one seemed to be able to deny her anything, and she had told the policeman that she was coming with them, and no one had refused her. She leapt into the back seat and was carried away as if she were on a flaring chariot flying halfway across the world in an instant.

She gave directions with the numbed, reality-based part of her mind, but in her deeper consciousness she was racing ahead through the blackness, seeing the path that her love had taken. The interviews. The brown serpent in the ruins of her family’s past had desired her life, and had stung her, nearly killing her. Her friend had rescued her, but the dragon still demanded a life. And Fish had stepped forward to pay the price, to battle alone with the enemy, to give up his life.

It was not a good ending to a fairy tale, but it was a more realistic ending. Fish had said that real life was more about the lonely struggle with darkness, the twisted fates of silent crucifixions. But she had been right about the dragon.

As they turned a bend in the road, she saw the burning barn and the tears began to run down her face.

The police car pulled to a stop, its red lights dimming and subdued before the angry furnace devouring her family’s past. Rose opened the car door upon cool air and hot fumes and was warned by a policeman to not get out, but she ignored him.

There was a car in front of them, parked in a strange way, as though the owner had merely pulled to a stop. As she passed it, its sides were warm—from the heat? No, she realized, it was still running, snorting out exhaust as though enraged.

Then she saw two figures darting in and out of the darkness around the barn, and heard the noise, beyond the fire, of a fierce conflict, like the contest between two monsters in the shadowy borders between purgatory and hell. Their silhouettes alternated between black against the flames and gray wraiths against the night, but from their cries, she could tell they were flesh and blood. And they were fighting with the intensity of two wild animals, a heavy-set muscular woman fighting like a tigress, a burly man wrestling her like a bear.

And when the policemen surged around them, they still continued to tussle heedlessly. At last the otherworldly battle was ended by the earthly efforts of the police wrenching the contestants apart. And one of the beasts abruptly recovered human form and panted out words in a thick, familiar voice.

“I was trying to stop her,” he gasped, “that’s all I was doing, was trying to stop her from getting away. Her partner got away, but I managed to stop her.”  

“Bear!” Rose cried, recognizing him.

Her brother-in-law looked at her, his face full of sudden light. “Rose!” he cried.

Hearing the name, the woman thrashed in her captor’s arms and recoiled. “My God,” she gasped, bloody and disheveled. “My God.”

Rose didn’t recognize Dr. Prosser, but few people who knew her would have at that moment.

“Where’s Fish?” she cried.

Bear couldn’t point, but he turned, and looked towards the blazing barn. For a moment, Rose’s heart stopped, but then she ran forward to the place where he had looked. As Lear might have stumbled towards his child’s corpse.

There on the ground before the barn doors he lay. He was lying on his side, his back to the inferno. As she came closer to him, she could see his disfigured face, his burned clothes, the ropes brutally tight around him, his one foot disjointed from the other in an ugly way. His eyes were closed, and his face was still, terribly still.

His body was hot. She moved him, dragging him backwards onto cooler ground, then gathered him into her arms. He hadn’t responded when she had touched him.

Now she ran her hands over his shoulders and bruised face, smoothing back his rumpled, unusually dark hair. His cheeks were black with soot, but when she wiped the soot, there was red beneath, and blood.

“Please, God, no,” she whispered with her empty voice, putting her wet cheeks down to his face. “Please, God, let him be alive.”

Vex not his ghost; O, let him pass!

He hates him that would upon the rack of this rough world

Stretch him out longer...

She tried to move him further from the fire, but as she did so, his face suddenly spasmed and he winced in pain but didn’t cry out.

Now she called his name, but there was no further response. She put her hands on his rough cheeks.

“Fish,” she whispered huskily. “You can’t die now. Please.”

The wonder is that he hath endured so long...

His chest rose and he gave a deep sigh that was cut off halfway down, and he coughed slightly.

“Why not?” his voice came wearily. There was a faint smile on his face, but his eyes were still closed.

She laughed at him even as she cried, pressing her fingers into his bound hands. “Please, please, if you love me, don’t die.”

His fingers reached through the ropes and grasped hers, and tightened. His grip was surprisingly strong, but his voice was fainter. “If I love you?”

“You do,” she whispered, brushing aside his hair. “I know you do.”

“...smart girl,” she thought she heard him say, but his voice drifted away, and that was the last he spoke.

25
...And the princess looked at him and declared that she would have him and none other for her husband...

Hers

Shakespeare’s comedies, Rose knew, usually ended with a wedding song and dance, and his tragedies ended with funerals. She wasn’t quite sure how this story would end—as a comedy or a tragedy, or a mixture of both.

They had insisted on admitting her to the hospital. Even though it was further away, they had brought her to the Catholic hospital. She had seen Sister Genevieve again, and the nun had been as good as her own mother, examining her and agreeing with the assertion that Rose remain for observation.

 “After all, if you’ve been dosed with alternating quantities of Phenobarbital, Propofol and other drugs for months on end, you’re bound to have some after-effects,” she said gently. “I think your friend Paul was quite right to insist on you being admitted.”

“Oh, I know I’m having to be weaned off the drugs and things, but why do I have to stay in here? I feel fit as a fiddle,” Rose said restlessly. “Particularly compared with Fish. Are you sure he’s going to be okay? The main reason I don’t want any time spent on me is because he needs it so much more.”

“He’s a miracle of survival,” the nun said quietly. “We’re doing everything we can.”

After Sister Genevieve had left, Rose sank back into her hospital bed, looking out the window, her eyes moist. If he didn’t survive, she doubted that her heart would. And she knew that for once, she wasn’t being over-dramatic.

H
IS

For a long time, he drifted in nothingness, barely aware of his continued existence. When he did become conscious of it, his first reaction was weary annoyance, and he decided not to pay attention to it.

Too much to do. That is, too much more sleeping to do. He wondered if he had finally given in and taken sleeping pills his doctor kept prescribing. Or perhaps the man had gone over his head and given him a dose when he was unaware. How like the medical profession, he thought. Over-prescribing, playing God, keeping people alive who should have just been allowed to die…or at least to sleep...

I’m not making sense. I should just stop thinking and go back to sleep,
he told himself.
What, are you still awake? You’re not thinking about that girl again, are you?

Rose. Rose Brier. She must have been the one responsible for this.
He was sure it was probably all her fault somehow.