Mayhem

by Michael MolisanI

  Margaret and Bixby sat together for a while, air so quiet that it became a low-pitched ringing in Margaret’s ears. A never ending note, the sound time made as it died.

  The night was total, luring the human eye forward until optic nerves began to manifest their own hallucinations, gimmicks to keep the brain sharp, spurring adrenaline and whispering primal tales of what lurked in the shadows.

  Of course, things actually did lurk in the shadows.

  “Are you scared?” Margaret asked softly, as minutes passed.

  “Hard to be scared, here. With a witch, Duchess.” Bixby’s voice cracked and changed pitch. She was invisible and her words seemed to float around the cab of their truck, fish caught in an old aquarium.

  Margaret sighed. The noise may as well have been a firecracker. With her left hand, she reached over her lap and opened the passenger door by pulling an old, plastic latch. It creaked once, then snapped, before swinging open. This triggered an overhead light, yellow and dim, sick like a dying animal. It blinded Margaret briefly, but she blinked hard and looked down in her lap.

  In front of her wide, taunt, stomach was a square box, hewn of wood and bound with tin and silver. It was no more than a few inches deep, and had been lacquered a shade of cerise, still tacky under Margaret’s fingers. Her thumb had left deep creases, curving and twisting. Across the box, trussed up in a floppy oversized bow, was a narrow strip of blue silk, bound tight. Along the edges, the silk was marked with black and deep crimson, dried blood from Margaret's own skin. She’d carved at her right thigh, holding a narrow dagger, making the offering sincere.

  My mother would have packaged this gift in the forest, Margaret smiled to herself, but she had two good hands to use.

  Meticulously sorted items filled Margaret’s box of wood and tacky lacquer. There were two metal buttons, a copper coil twisted to look like a dragon, rusted tacks and silver earrings that didn’t match. There was also a flattened piece of lead, two wedding rings of soft, simple gold, and a large whip that could scream when cracked by a certain witch.

  This was the debt Maggi Lopez owed Marinette Bras Cheche.

  “The brass and leaden carapace; that killed a royal king. Two hearts pledged together, bound by golden rings. A snake of bloodied leather; whose bite will burn flesh with icy knell.”

  Considering the box, Margaret gasped, in both surprise and pain.

  “Duchess?” Bixby inquired, turning sideways, offering a hand with chewed nails.

  Margaret shook her head fast, dropping her right leg out of the truck’s cab and glancing over at the steward’s daughter. Her face was long and gaunt, and she had no need of rouge to color her cheeks and flushed nose, “Barrett just kicked, nothing to fret.”

  Wrinkling her nose, Bixby inquired, “You’re sure it’s a boy, then?”

  Exhaustion crossed Margaret’s face, but her smile was sincere, “I know he’s a boy, because he told me. He won’t be so tall as my husband. That’s my fault, but he’ll be strong all the same.”

  Bixby seemed amazed by this tale, her large eyes growing as her jaw began to slack. It seemed to Margaret as though she was listening to an old story about ghosts or haunted houses. Afraid as she was in love with things that seemed so impossible. Margaret didn’t bother to read her mind. There was little that Bixby didn’t freely share with her mouth.

  “Take care then, Duchess.”

  Turning away, and letting her wooden box, trussed with blue silk, fall to the warm seat, Margaret slid out of the truck and stood upright. Under a jacket of cotton and duck oil, a metal hand poked from beneath her right sleeve. The silver plates caught bisque light, shimmering briefly.

  “Pray to your gods, child,” Margaret leaned in, grabbing the package with her functioning left hand. Shadow turned her auburn-red hair black and made her eyes depthless pools of night, “They’ll watch over you when I’m gone.”

  Stepping back, Margaret kicked the 4x4’s passenger door closed.

  Total darkness returned as easily as it had been chased away. Imprints of the cab and Bixby’s face blinked across Margaret’s field of view, each time her lashes fluttered. With great care she slowly stepped around the truck to begin her walk across the decayed road, stone and pebble biting the arches of her bare feet, demanding she offer them just the smallest drop of blood in payment for her toll.

  Santa Cruz was a river below her. A strange mix of old and new energy, intense power that lurked between hills and trees, watching her. An ancient god, awake just enough to be interested in the little witch and her large belly.

  Margaret kept walking, into the darkness.

  Darkness was key, she imagined her mother saying, the right kind of darkness. A place where trees were so thick that the moon couldn’t penetrate.

  The further she went, the more limbs tugged at Margaret. She was careful with her footing, unwilling to risk tripping. An inconvenience that would risk an already risky pregnancy. This was, however, part of her payment toward Maggi’s debt, some of the interest owed.

  When she understood she’d gone far enough, Margaret carefully knelt down in the cool, damp soil, placing her wooden box to the side. She took a moment to hike up her skirt, just enough that her knees laid bare on earth. The song of the world could vibrate up through her spine, a memory of the land itself.

  This sort of digging needed to be rhythmic, pulsing, you must let your hindbrain take over and set your breathing in time with the movements.

  Maggi, or perhaps the memory of Maggi, whispered in Margaret’s mind as she withdrew a small, iron trowel from her jacket. With one hand she stabbed into the soft earth. Over and over again, dragging soil up to her knees, past her thighs, and even kissing her swollen belly. The artificial arm hung at her side, frozen halfway between motion and illusion, hinges locked tight, silver plates of her fake fingers clicking as she leaned forward.

  Finally, pleased that this was deep enough, Margaret replaced the filthy trowel and reached for her box of tacky lacquer, carefully placing it in her miniature pit.

  “Maggi’s debt is now paid,” Margaret whispered, her neck tilted back, hip cramping. She wanted to take a second longer, to listen to the silence of the forest, to stretch her mind out and feel the shadow creatures that skulked among the trees. Something pushed back, however, something told her no.

  Accepting of this, Margaret used her left hand to scoop the freshly damp soil back over her offering, palm pressing and patting the earth until she was satisfied.

  It was a challenge to stand up. Barrett was a bigger child than her tiny frame could accommodate, and she only had one hand to steady her, but Margaret returned to her feet.

  “For me?” The voice was feminine, distant, and muffled. “I need not share?”

  The syllables moved around Margaret, gasping for air. Skipping stones clattered around, dry bones hinging against each other, clicking like insects and then shifting with a breeze that didn’t blow. The world was curving around her. Not as violent as it had been in San Francisco, nowhere near painful. It simply felt like a door had opened, beckoning into distant hallways.

  Maggi’s voice whispered close to Margaret’s ear, My Lady of the Dry Arms, I’d never ask you to share your treasure.

  “This treasure is only for you. The debt I promised, paid. An answer to your riddle.”

  Sifting sashes caught a light that didn’t glow in the forest, and Margaret could see afterimages moving close. Bones and fingers, ribs and spine, silhouetted against nothing more than the darkness, “Maggi wished for flames on her fingers, a kiss of agony. Her debt is now paid, but perhaps we can do business?”

  Margaret smiled, easily. A clever witch, she could never be lured into such a trap. Marinette Bras Cheche was a kind of lovely parasite, a necessity of the old world, a broker in dreams and wishes.

  Then again, Margaret considered, clearing Maggi’s credit, stealing the Eye of Shahr-i-Sokhta, it had all been easy enough.

  Easy enough for a clever witch.

  “I
have no more trinkets to pay you, Lady of the Dry Arms.”

  Marinette Bras Cheche’s shawls and scarves fell across Margaret, cold and perhaps wet, beyond a winter kiss or flurry of snow. This was a cutting algid, a reminder that this world had little in common with any beyond the Veil.

  “You’ve proven a witch of means, with a word like iron,” Marinette whispered close to Margaret’s ear, a tickle across her lobe, against her neck. She could hear the same giggling orgasm that Townsend gifted, the night they’d made Barrett.

  “Mmm,” Margaret thought, toying with this idea, “What could I ask for?”

  “My lovely,” the brumal murmur sweetened, “you can ask for anything.”

  Margaret expected the memory of her mother to argue, in her mind. To demand she leave this place and make no more bargains beyond the Veil. But the memory was silent, just as silent as the grave of Maggi Lopez. This was Margaret’s choice, and if she told Marinette that she wanted nothing, it would have been a lie.

  Few things were beyond a battlewitch; fewer still, Duchess of the Bay Area Reach.

  “I’m with child, a boy. It's rare that boys inherit magic, but it can happen. It has happened. I want this child to know the world as I know it. I want him to hear the sound of dreams and taste love and anger as I have. I want him to be a witch.”

  Marinette cackled close to Margaret, the sound undulating past her skin, raising hairs at the back of her neck, and pouring lascivious desire into the very marrow of Margaret’s bones.

  It was so long before Marinette replied, that Margaret wondered if perhaps she had found something not on offer for a wish-broker.

  “Oh yes, little witch. We shall do business together.”

  8:32 pm January 8th, 40 Veilfall

  San Francisco, California

  A man, in plaid pants sat at the corner of this restaurant. His face was narrow, ill shaven, with thick bangs that fell past his eyes as he leaned over a wide, wooden instrument. A hurdy gurdy. His right hand moved the crank with rhythmic stops and starts, fingers of his left hand spasming across the keys, hammering on the strings. The instrument was freshly lacquered in black, painted in the silver blossoms of House Owens, and smelled of oil. Behind him was a dowdy woman with crooked bangs and tobacco stained lips, her elbow to bow. Raking across the strings of a less cared for violin, battered and scratched, her chin tucked low.

  The couple weaved melody like a fine tapestry of thick woolen twine; it covered empty tables and chairs like a warm blanket and echoed off the wooden floor and plaster walls. Tangible as the white smoke rising off incense decanters, at wall’s edge.

  “Mistress, you’se have a visitor.”

  Aubriana Harvester turned away from the music, a deep strum pulling at her chest, behind the sternum. Yellow chicken fat ran down her chin and she leaned over to run her jaw along the black velvet of her coat shoulder. “A visitor? At this hour?”

  The man standing over her was small, with scars efflorescent. Yellow teeth were visible past a lumpy, ruined cheek, and his nose was long absent giving him a skeletal appearance with rat eyes. “It’s a fucking shit-show, Mistress.”

  Aubriana smirked. Badger’s voice of saccharine gravel delighted her. “It?”

  Badger shrugged, the tendons in his neck taunt, “Could be a she.”

  The chicken leg in Aubriana’s right hand was tossed to plate, rolling through a sauce of grease, melted fat, and thick curry. She ran her fingers across the mauve table cloth until they were clean, leaving dark stains. Cuffs of finely spun, golden chainmail whispered around her wrists, then draped down past her knuckles when she kicked the wooden chair back.

  “I’m game,” Aubriana’s smirk became a smile. Her voice was husky, slippery, like warm batter and chilled lard.

  Badger didn’t acknowledge this, nor did he scrape, as he turned on a heel to leave. It seemed to Aubriana that he moved with a hitch in his step, an old wound at the knee or hip.

  Running her tongue along teeth, picking out fragments of meat and spices, Aubriana turned her head and spit. One of her eyes was a pool of splattered ink, the other covered with a thick patch of umber leather that had been stitched into her flesh with thick twine of burgundy. When she drew breath it came deeply and heaved her chest in, as if she savored the air.

  Badger returned in several moments with something like a person.

  It did seem feminine. A clearly defined bust above stomach, wrapped in narrow strips of tattered wool, each dyed a different shade of gray or jet. When it walked, it drug a left leg as if it was a dead animal, brought to ground, fresh for the stew. There was nothing natural in how it moved, a lurching half-stumble that almost matched the hurdy gurdy rhythm, arms shifting for balance with graceless jerking, fingers drawn up and tensed.

  Aubriana did not turn away from the thing as it approached. Her pulse quickened with something adjacent to adoration.

  “It’s a she, Badger,” Aubriana said, turning her head with a shout back to the man with no nose, “and she’s lovely. Take your leave.”

  Badger wrinkled up the remains of his face and mouthed the words ‘take your leave’ to the table closest, before stepping back to the restaurant lobby.

  The closer Aubriana’s guest came, the more fetid her stench of rotten flesh and wet wool became. A raucous odor that left Aubriana’s smile undeterred.

  With her left foot, Aubriana kicked out a wooden chair at her table, extending it for the wretched husk, hand gesturing slowly, with gentle ease.

  When the ragged woman sat, it was with great difficulty. Her left knee would not bend and stuck out past her chair, like a nail that had been abused at its neck by hammer, rusted beyond repair. Lines around her eyes cut deep. Shaded darker than colorless and tattered lips, every bit as gruesome as the scars that exposed Badger’s teeth.

  Her eyes, however, were milk white. A drawing fog that invited chills down Aubriana’s spine despite her affection. Beyond the mask of ripped flesh and molding burlap, Aubriana could feel nothing about her guest. She was a void, a place where the hurdy gurdy and violin wail did not penetrate. A cut in the room, that opulence found impenetrable.

  “You have a name?” Aubriana inquired, tilting her head down, one good eye in her skull offering a kinder gaze than anyone had known in countless years.

  Plague Dog.

  The woman calling herself Plague Dog didn’t project the words into Aubriana’s mind, so much as she flooded the room with a stain of sorrow and pain, painted in syllables and vowels. It was so intense that Aubriana heard the violin player flummox several notes.

  “You can’t speak?” Aubriana ignored the groping sadness that pulled at her velvet coat.

  Plague Dog did not answer.

  Undeterred, Aubriana pressed on, but leaned in closer to whisper, “You’re Amihan Lopez, then? Daughter of Aniceta Lopez?”

  Again, Plague Dog did not answer.

  Exhaling slowly, Aubriana chose her words carefully. “Aniceta was in my care, a long time ago. She tended my wounds, and we had a secret. I was the one in her care.”

  My mother died when we were young.

  Once more the hollow swoop of weary sadness flooded. Aubriana glanced to the stage as her violinist dropped instrument and bow, swallowing hard. It was thick in the air, a feeling that painted the tables and chairs in swatches of dolor.

  Aubriana’s smile did not falter and after a brief pause she said, “It’s amazing what you can do when you refuse to die. Isn’t it, Amy?”

  It was only now that Aubriana noticed the table at Plague Dog’s side was beginning to decay. Bright green enamel was peeling up, powdering, revealing grayed wood that turned bleached and brittle. The chair under was no different, twisting and crumpling under Plague Dog’s weight as years ticked by, faster and faster, in unchecked entropy.

  Every nerve in Aubriana’s mind told her to run, to get away, to flee this thing whose very touch was caustic. Her body was a gift from Lady Mayhem, a treasure of unimaginable worth, young enough to move
without pain, graced with a lovely jaw that hinged and slurped at the delights of this world, teeth and tongue wholly intact.

  Aubriana, however, did not run.

  Plague Dog’s chair shattered, centuries rotten and frail. Flecks of green paint were spirited away, dust as whispers. As dread the visage of Plague Dog was, so too was the intensity of her piteous collapse. She wept, her mouth open and silent in the room, fingers clawing at her face in a baseless rage that threatened to rend off what remained of her pallor. Her shoulders heaved, ghostly sobs, silent as a graveyard.

  Rattled to her very core, Aubriana stood, kicking away her own chair. The hurdy gurdy player ceased performance, nearly dropping his instrument, and clutched the hand of his partner. They fled, as fast as legs would carry, boots and shoes scuffing, gasping at air to fuel their labor.

  Aubriana had once stood in flesh given to her at birth. Not a stolen corpse, but bones that grew and held her high from infant to woman. She could still hear the hum of a sodium street light, and remember how jeans moved against her hips, the arch of her feet, bend of her ankles in heels, and salton balm of bay air. Plague Dog’s cry was a familiar old melody that Aubriana kept in tune for decades. It was a kind of loneliness that peeled flesh from muscle and hollowed out the mind until something like madness was left in its wake. To fear, one had to possess something that could be lost. Aubriana feared to lose her body, a return to her exile, a colorless specter bound to San Francisco for eternity.

  “I know what you feel,” Aubriana growled, watching the pathetic creature writhe. She was in pain, madness threatened to drown her where she lay.

  The wooden floor under her spine and shoulders was starting to warp, with age.

  What am I?

  Her thoughts shrieked, no longer a torrent of sorrow, rather a crash of rage, hammering old rocks and seagull shit.