Stories From the Plague Years (18 page)

The boy’s mother leaves. I hear her say what she does not speak. Her wish to truly say it makes the bellows-haze of the room flurry like wasps.

“
You’re shit.
”

The boy presses harder with his stick of wax as his mother’s thought grips the back of his neck.

There is pressure as I take the red eyes the boy has drawn, as I become a glamour just a bit more visible than I had been.

The boy feeds me poison in the night.

But only what poison he spits up.

The father sits before the box that sorcel-traps moving images. The boy is nervous as he sits beside the father, and wishes to be welcome, and to not be afraid. While fear murks with desire, I am summoned to stand behind the boy, pulled as if by a rope crafted of the twitching legs of wasps. The boy is aware of me, as some are aware of the coming of storms in their bones. I know this limbo. It is a home to me. It is the color of the boundary suspended between the earth and sky, where Beltane offerings killed by rope or fire are most treasured—where flesh burns best and where seed that would give me a woman’s form of root-matter falls best. Time shifts, as if by a farewell, or by the start of a cloaked exile. The boy conjures, out of the need to be acknowledged, and by the fear that he
will
be acknowledged. The motes of my being respond to the boy’s silent chant before this glowing altar.

Words of power and invocation filth the air, but they are not spoken by any who have breath or throat. The words are dream-syllables that accommodate the father’s dread and desire. Though I know not what the words mean, they have the bile-flavour of
weregild
, of deep shadow forests forbidden to travelers and the desperate springtime lifting of flesh with a stone knife to ensure a bounty of crops. The words are pulled from the ether. The father takes the trance of their power, as if they are spoken by a hierophant before a bloody stone table. The bodiless voice carried from the box with the face of glass has the feel of greasy metal cooling.

. . . youths . . . disturbances . . . wildings . . .

The words of power seize the mind of the father and wave-daub the mind of the boy. The un-present priest speaking the words is made of shifting light trapped within the box. He is a spell that itself casts a spell. He is less real than is the shifting light of heat and marsh-breath that births will-o’-wisps, though he is much more powerful in his capacity to bewitch and lead astray.

. . . shooting . . . unrest . . . drug-related . . .

The phrases connecting the thrawn-words are nothing. They are like the chants that bridge the uttered Names of gods that are at once loved and dreaded; the bridging words serve only to pace out the invocations. The gorge of fear nourishes both father and son. The gorge of fear shores the walls, and makes this home a fortress of the imagination. It masques the walls in the guise of a haven safe from fell beings—beings who, in the minds of those who live here, carry only the
shape
of humanity. I had been once such a fell being of human shape in this very spot, which had been a wood-rimmed clearing scant years before the sundering of trees and the fever-swift building of houses. I had once been made a giant of a man, glimpsed. I had been the gleam of a hook where there had been a hand. I had been both the snapping of a twig and the imagined boot that snapped the twig. Fear and desire had danced in this spot before the coming of houses, though in a way much different from how they do now.

. . . violence . . . urban . . . projects . . .

I am made more visible to the boy’s storm-seeking nerves. I drizzle the blood in his spine cold. Were he to stand, his knees would be limp for reasons he could not guess. The father is made more uncomfortable by the boy’s discomfort. He looks to his child, freshly in awe of the god- words of fear he has unknowingly worshipped. He hates the boy’s lack of deformity. Hates the lack of wickedness in the boy that would exonerate him from the apostasy of despising his own issue. The father looks to the box’s glass face, to the will-o’-wisp priest whose image gives way to images of shadow-people running on city streets. The father’s own face would be reflected on the glass if he strained to see it, in the same way he would see the lack of monstrosity in his child if he chose to see it.

“
Not my kid
,” he thinks for the pleasure of thinking it and the pleasure of controlling his reality by fiat. His discomfort abates, as if pressed under a poultice. And with that thought of the father’s, the muscles of the boy’s back clench as if a blade were drawn at his hind. It is the same tension I was aware of in a girl who long ago turned and searched for me beneath a great outcrop of rock without knowing why, but who knew that she would find me there swaddled in tresses of my own hair. The boy knows he is thought of by his father, and is in an ecstasy of hope for a kind word and of fear of punishment for an unspoken offense.

The father lets his hand drop to the back of the pillowed bench on which they sit, and does not know that the boy expects at once a pat upon the head or a pulling of his hair—both have been bestowed to the boy with equal suddenness. The father does not know why, but is pleased by the confusion he senses in the boy; hope and dread flavour the air in a way that allows me to taste my own ether-misted physicality.

The father himself becomes a hierophant, using words of power like those that have touched his mind. He gestures to the box, to the image of a city goblin led in shackles.

“You ever become a little white nigger like that, I’ll kill you.”

The father pats the boy’s head, and the boy waits to feel fingers close and pull.

I darken. My red eyes take sclera of white.

In his ecstasy of acceptance and fear, the boy would see my shape if he turned his head.

The pictures tell a story in bright colors of god-like warriors and chieftains. The boy fixes upon one image that fascinates and terrifies him. He presses the image upon the paper with his gaze, and I am pinned beneath the boy in my hovel under his bed; his attentions and fears hold me fast, as would a needle driven through the back of a beetle. The boy has endured more this day. Conscripted by his mother to help make food, she reviled him for dropping eggs like those I would have once spoiled with an infusion of my essence to announce my coming with the retch- smell of sulphur. Still stinging from her reproach, in the night he now stares at the image of a monster, a beast-man, abominating it to feel superior to it while at the same time feeling kinship with it for being abominated.

The boy enters a new trance staring at the image, a new state of half-vision brought upon by half-wakefulness.

But later in darkness, the boy lies fully awake above me while he tries to sleep.

In darkness, in the deep night, he has made me densely formed enough with his trance for me to draw raspy breath that he barely hears. The branch-twig fingers of the claws he has given me can lightly click upon the floor.

I am the living
wyrd
he needs to despise. His eyes dry in the darkness, for he is too afraid to blink. He fears to whistle up the flameless light he thinks may dispel me, believing I will seize his arm in the dry bark of my grasp as he reaches for the lamp. But I cannot seize him, so immobile am I made by his fear.

The boy’s eyes are dry, and I speak to them.

I change the darkness; while I am so dense, it is my food. I fill the darkness with forms as I pluck shades from pitch and depths from moon-whispered greys. I force shapes and beasts and apparitions onto the smooth stones of his sight. Immobile, I feed on shadows. I must while so physical. And I exhaust him with fear. His racing mind finally sleeps, and I am free to wander the house that has snared me.

This home is orderly. Where there had been thicket and rim of moss-draped trees before, when I had been a hook-handed monster, there is now nothing for me to straighten in the night and so incur the thanks that would free me from this place. The tables and cutting boards are wiped with oil so fine, the wood beneath cannot ever breathe or rot. There is no winter fuel to stack. No wool to spin. No residue of the eggs broken at dusk lingers to give me a homunculus-like form that would drop to shapelessness with the crowing of the cock.

I stand above the mother as she sleeps, for she demands that I do. I become the intruder she fears. The Man With The Knife she welcomes to dread, so that she as a victim will be free of the sick burden of self-determination that she so resents. The father feels the house in his sleep more tangibly than he does the blankets he rests beneath. He feels himself shackled to his property;
it
owns
him
. His worries infuse the timbers. They vibrate and are strengthened with his sweat-slicked fear.

The boy had liked the screaming, and so I choke on remorse. Remorse is alien to me . . . thus I am more familiar with its cruelties than are those who are born with it. I have never welcomed it, any more than the boy would welcome the hand of another grafted to his wrist. I try to fathom remorse, to know it as would one for whom it is natural as skin. Thus am I hurt by it more.

The boy had liked the screaming; it walks his mind. And thus he presses regret out of himself. It flavours the poison that has flavoured me these past six winters. The boy had liked the screaming, and the fur-warm twitching in his hands that became still.

I have lurked near boys like him, for whom the drowning of kittens had been a chore, and the screams a bother to be tolerated, like cuts inflicted by the baling of hay. I have stood behind such boys, who were infused with the smell of compost and rotting chaff. I have dried the milk in the udders of animals in their charge and made them fear for their blood in the night.

Remorse veins the air. I hate it. And in hating it, I feel remorse all the more strongly.

The boy has seen me, in the same way the farmer of long ago had seen me for an instant in glory upon the barrow I warded, in the second his eyes re-fleshed to smooth-grained rowan. The instant of the boy’s blinding reveals me. The thunder of his skull shattering from scores of small stones thrown by a blast of charcoal and sulphur had been uglier than the sounds of wooden orbs pulled by the tongs of a blacksmith. The boy’s eyes that had been made stone had been burst by stone.

The house, with the sundering of the boy’s mind, has fully accepted the maledictions spoken to the boy over the passing years. They now invisibly wright the walls. They are the hated legacy of a hated place that holds the curse of a youth dying by his own violence within it.

The house is like the barrow. It is like the great stone I slept under by the roadside. Yet those places had been free to the air and sky. These invested walls hold me; they have been taught to grip fast the anxious worry that first snared me. They hold the boy who had found no release for his stifled remorse other than through thunder, fire and stones thrown through smooth and oiled pipes of metal. His remorse chokes me and thicket-traps me fast.

I am the conscripted midwife to the haunting of this place. The boy is that which haunts. He had seen me in the instant of his death. He is lonely and afraid of what I might be in the un-fleshed spaces of the place that had been home to him, and that shall be his home past death. His fear of me perpetuates the poison he had been fed; it no longer needs to be spoken. Yet despite his fear I cannot reach him. He is visible, yet untouchable as the grain of wood beneath beeswax.

We shall haunt this place separately until it falls.

I look at you and wonder if I love you.

We sit, and I see you. We sit, and can do nothing else. The light—the lovely light that entrances so many—touches you . . . mirages you . . . reveals the dusk of your brow and I realize for the first time how much we look alike. Handsome jaw. Handsome eyes.

“Is that why we first became lovers?” you say, speaking my thought. Speaking my
untrue
thought . . . pulling it from my mind with a sharp pain as if you had pulled a thorn. You know it to be an untrue thought. The pain you inflicted was an act of healing which will never form a scar.

I look at you, as I have without respite since last night, and am taken by your beauty. I wonder if to be so taken is a thing truly
felt
. What I feel that I might feel is a sadness unreleased, a sorrow held in a cold metal urn. I look at you, at the blood on you. It gives the smell of brass corroded by sweat. There is skin on my lips, and I would spit it away, if I could. But to do so would diminish my dignity. I can hold onto that—dignity. But not love? Not love for you or myself or anything? Together we shall avoid all things. We shall avoid our very selves if we can, split ourselves from ourselves and un-knit the fabric of birth.

I would spit the skin away. Would you?

It was for dignity that we were born.

It was for lack of dignity that we died. I am aware of the phone beside you ceasing to ring. When had it started? We should answer no further calls. Perhaps one who finds us darling wishes us to come for gin and tonic (when had afternoon come?), for the boring spectacle of civility.