What Big Teeth

by Rose Szabo

  When she adjusts her grip, grabbing Arthur by the wrist, I am sucked back into her. But I cannot lose what I have seen. Looking around I can feel the thick cobwebby shadows hanging over everything she does.

  She drags Arthur into the kitchen, where the body of her son still lies in its crib. She screams for Miklos until he appears, cowering, and makes him help her lift the body onto the table. She wants to torture Arthur, but he can feel nothing; his neck is broken. So in frustration she slits him open and starts pulling out his guts, determined that she will augur in them the way to bring back her son.

  She doesn’t see it, the one thing she wants to know. She searches frantically through intestines and organs looking for truth. She’s panicking. But I am studying his entrails. I have no magic left in me, no body, no hope, no luck I have not spent. It is the only thing left that I can do.

  There is far more to read in Arthur than that one single thing, the only thing my younger self can care about in this moment. In him, I see the whole history of my family: secrets I never knew the answers to, no matter how hard I searched. Why Margaret never speaks. Where Lusitania went when she ran away. How my son first fell in love with Arthur, and how he convinced himself to marry someone else. What Luma fears the most.

  And I see Eleanor. Fifty years before her birth, here she is, written in Arthur’s body. What she will do to that boy, that night in the woods. What she will do for us, before it is all over.

  I see all of us, the past and the present and the future, unspooled inside his guts. And I see Arthur, too. That he loved us. That before we shut him out, he would have done anything for us. That if we had found a way to welcome him in, we would have become a three-bodied creature of impossible size and power. An invincible rolling ball of monsters we would have become, if only we’d had the truths Arthur has inside of him. I see it all, and then my younger self, in impotent rage, screams and scrapes it all onto the floor.

  “Oh, my friend,” I whisper to him, across the gap between our younger selves. “What have I done to you?”

  For young Persephone will not let him die. She has decided that his pain was over too quickly, that he must stay and suffer for what he has done.

  She begins to chant. She asked for knowledge on that hill, and sometimes when she wants it, it rises into her, unbidden. Her voice is a dark and rolling sea. I scream at her in her mind, “Girl, stop this nonsense, let him go, we don’t need to do this, can’t you read the entrails?” But in this moment she has a body, and she has the power. Shadows creep in closer, gaining mass and shape. They cling to her body and her hair. They cling to Arthur as she begins to cut him up into something she can preserve.

  She cuts out his eyes, which she has envied. She whispers into his ear commands: he will not leave this place, he will not hurt any Zarrin again, he will obey no others, he will serve them and give them, and be, whatever they require, whatever they desire—hah, what a mistake to make. She takes his heart from his chest and puts it into a wooden box. She stuffs his chest with rags and stitches him shut roughly. She takes his heart, in its box, and pries up the floorboards in the front hall, and lets it drop down into the foundations of the house with a heavy thud.

  When she is done with Arthur, he is her thing to command. When she tells him to sit up, he sits up. When she tells him to stand, he stands, although one leg is twisted and bent, although his head dangles precariously from his broken neck. She makes him walk out of the house, to the cellar, and climb down into the earth. She tells him to dig, and to not stop digging until she says he can. She ignores him for a month, although she can hear him every night: digging, always digging. She orders him to build his own coffin. She orders him to lie down in it. She writes commands that he must follow: he must come when she calls, and do what she wants, and when she is done with him he must go back to his box and lie perfectly still in the ground until she needs him again.

  I had forgotten this. I’d told myself that I would never do any magic like this again, and I didn’t, for as long as I lived. And I thought that meant I had left it behind me. But how could I, when doing it made me who I am, when Arthur has been with me ever since? How many days, in fifty years, did I summon him from the ground, or send him away to lie in his grave? Whole years had gone by where I hadn’t called him forth at all, where he must have lain still, trapped in his own dead flesh. I wonder how I could have ever for a moment joked with him, or had him help me with my taxes, or let him teach my children, and not thought about what I had done.

  * * *

  For a long time I lay still in the dark. And then, after what felt like forever, the lamp below us fizzled and came on, lighting the cellar with a faint glow. Arthur was beside me. I reached over to his shoulders. My heart felt like a cup poured up to the brim. If it tipped over, I knew I would cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course not. You’ve been preoccupied with feeling all alone. You don’t know what alone is.” He pulled back from me. “You’re lucky to have been born into a family that loved you.”

  “I can’t believe she did this to you.”

  He waved a hand.

  “I killed her child. But later, she promised that she’d release me when she died. She said it wouldn’t have to be forever.”

  I could see now how it had gone. He was their thing, their wonderful, eternal plaything.

  “Do we all fall in love with you?” I asked.

  “For a time. Usually it passes.”

  I felt sick. Was that all I’d felt for him? Some ghost of a feeling, handed down from my family? I didn’t want Arthur to be a thing to me.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Persephone wouldn’t let me talk about any of it. Some part of the magic. I suppose she didn’t want anyone to know what she had done. I’ve never been able to tell anyone until you.”

  The way his mouth had tightened at the dinner table, not letting him say certain words. He could joke with us, laugh with us, sit at our table and pretend to eat our food. But he could never tell us what he really wanted, what he really meant.

  “You deserve better,” I said.

  He scoffed and looked away.

  “I mean it!” I reached out and pulled his face back toward me, looked into the places where his eyes should have been. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “You’ll do nothing. You want to keep me here as badly as any of them.”

  “I do,” I said. “But I won’t.”

  I gritted my teeth. How did I say it? It usually happened by mistake.

  “You’re free, Arthur,” I said.

  For a moment, we both waited, anticipating. The darkness felt thick around us. But at last, he shook his head.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “I have tried many things, over the years, to free myself, or to ruin the family. When you came, I thought perhaps you were my answer, since you seemed determined to ruin the business.” He smiled humorlessly. “But you did better than that. Soon your grandmere will kill everyone here. And then maybe I’ll be free. Or at the least, I’ll be alone.”

  “You can’t let that happen to us,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I can’t hurt anyone in your family. But the beauty of this plan is that I don’t have to do anything at all.”

  “I could make you help me.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “Does that mean you trust me?”

  That made him smile a little, although I saw him try to hide it.

  “I’m going to kill her,” I said. “I’ll poison her while she’s sleeping. The drakondia is strong enough to kill anything. But I need to get upstairs without anyone seeing me come in. There’s another way into the house, isn’t there?”

  He nodded and pointed into a shadowed corner. At first, I saw nothing, and then I realized that the dark stain on the wall was actually a hole. And inside that hole was a steep little flight of steps.

  “Those used to c
ome out in the kitchen,” he said. “But now, there’s a little hollow space, and they come out—”

  “Under the staircase,” I said. “I know.”

  He grabbed my hand. “It’s a bad idea to go up there,” he said. “She’s very dangerous.”

  I looked down at the hand that had killed Miklos and Persephone’s baby, wrapped around mine. Cool to the touch, but gripping me with surprising strength. I looked back up at him, and he let go as though I’d burned him. In spite of everything he’d said, he didn’t want me getting hurt. That was something I could warm myself with.

  “I’m going to find a way to get rid of her,” I said. “And once she’s gone I’m going to break the spell on you.”

  “Nothing will be different.” He moved back and away from me, further into shadow. “Nothing is ever going to change for me.”

  “It will be,” I said. “Because I’m different.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I scrambled forward on my hands, feeling the damp cellar floor staining my skirt at the knees. I looked into his lovely, mutilated face.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” I said. “Because I’m going to show you.”

  I wanted to kiss him, or to bite into his neck. But I didn’t. I grinned at him in the dark instead, baring all my teeth.

  “If I need your help,” I asked, “can I count on you?”

  “I am yours.”

  “Not for long!”

  I thought I heard him laugh. But I was already scrambling through the hole on my hands and knees, into the crumbling ruins of an older basement with a half-rotted set of stairs.

  I climbed up it carefully in the dark, testing each stair to see if it would hold my weight. And then, I was inside the walls. Wires hung down here and there and smacked me across the face. But I picked my way along slowly, feeling with my hands for the panel I knew was here, somewhere. Then, under my fingers, the latch that had stopped me last time.

  The half light of the hallway was blinding after the darkness of the cellar. At first, I did not see Father crouched in front of me.

  He was growling low, under his breath, little more than a dim shape on the carpet. I found myself wondering: How quickly could I get back into the wall? Would the panel hold him, if he tried to come after me?

  “Don’t hurt me,” I said, feeling sick doing it. “Be quiet.” It wasn’t really him, so maybe it wasn’t so wrong. But the growling didn’t stop.

  “That will not work, my dear,” said Grandmere, from above us.

  She came down the stairs and swept around the corner. She was wearing a long day dress of pale green, and she had her lavender gloves on, her hair perfectly coiffed. I hated her, but at the same time, I felt embarrassed to stand in front of her looking so dirty.

  “Miles is a part of me, and you cannot possibly expect to command me,” she said. She didn’t sound angry, I realized. She was brisk, matter-of-fact. “But it is good that you have returned.”

  Father had not stopped growling and was advancing toward me.

  “Now,” Grandmere said. “Shut that door, and do not leave this house again until I say you may.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and poured every ounce of my concentration into holding my hands at my sides. But they lifted, and I turned around, and without looking, without wanting to, I closed the door. Grandmere smiled at me.

  “At last,” she said, “we can begin to talk seriously about your future.”

  * * *

  When I finish speaking, Eleanor’s body expels me. Without her to anchor me I float between the present and the past, as I have done since I died. I can show her snatches of it in dreams, but I cannot explain to a living girl what it is like to be dead: to be reliving everything that happened to you, all at once. I cannot leave the house; I have tried, and have found that if I try to leave by the back door, I come in through the front. High enough in the attic and I find myself down in the bottom of Arthur’s pit in the cellar. My world is circumscribed by these walls.

  I float through lonely years, when I could barely stand to be in the house: after Rhys died, after Lusitania vanished in her teens, after she left for good the day I sent Eleanor to school. I watch myself lie in bed for nearly a year after the death of Rhys, Miklos stalking the hills like a wild animal. Briefcases and suitcases piled up in the hall during those years I waited for Miklos to die. Margaret was born in those years, my strange child who spoke in single words before the age of one, and never spoke any more than that in her entire life.

  I linger here, through the pain of reliving this grief, because I want to see Margaret again. After all, I was barely awake for it the first time around. As it goes, I only catch glimpses: when she toddles to my bedside to nurse, when she first brings us something: a glass of water, and my younger self drinks it, and holds her, and cries for the mother she was, once, to Rhys.

  It is not anything he does that rouses her from her torpor. It is the visit at their door from a little group of women from town. They come in a huddle up the hill, carrying sticks and barely concealed boning knives. The woman at the head has a pistol. They knock on her door. We drag ourselves out of bed to answer it.

  So sorry to bother you, they say. It’s no trouble, she replies with automatic politeness. When she talks to these women from town she sounds just like them. My, what a surprise. Please, come in.

  They crowd into her parlor and let her make them tea. She can feel them looking around the place. Miklos has an eye for architecture—or did, before we lost Rhys and he took to the woods. But he never cared much for furniture, so all we have is what she bought before she lost everything, including her interest in picking out chairs. The parlor has one chair in it and one low table. The women stand. Little Margaret comes and carries in the sugar bowl proudly in both hands. I look at her through the greasy hair that falls over my younger self’s eyes. She must be three or four. She looks like I did as a child, if you had poured everything I was into a short squared-off body like Miklos’s. Large eyes, dark hair, that good Cretan nose. I want to snatch her up from the past and bring her forward to a time when she could be loved properly, rather than being the goblin of my grief.

  “We wanted to tell you,” says the elder Hannafin woman, the unspoken leader of the group. “Your … dog has been getting closer and closer to town.” She uses the word dog with care, to avoid another word, but my younger self can’t tell that right now.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “We don’t have a dog. Dogs don’t like Miklos.”

  I want to slap her—is she asleep, or was I actually this stupid once?

  “Well,” says the old Mrs. Hannafin, “There is a … big dog … that comes from your lands. It’s been seen a few times in the street at night. Maybe it’s a wild dog.” She will not say wolf. It has become the unspoken obscenity of this conversation. “Maybe your … husband could take care of it. If he doesn’t, then we will have to do something about it.”

  Bless them. They didn’t have to be this polite. They’re showing gratitude for the love potions, the loaves of bread, the words whispered over their bellies in better times.

  “We know you lost your boy,” says a smaller woman from near the back, very young.

  The others ease to the sides to let her forward. She is thin and dark-haired, with a deep crease in her forehead despite her youth. She could be a daughter of Agia Galini, one of the Cretan fishwives’ children that Persephone had played with. She purses her lips together to wet them before she speaks again.

  “I felt like you did once. Everything looks dark, you look at your family and you don’t know them. But you’ve got a little girl now, Mrs. Zarrin. I know it’s not the same. But she needs you the same. Time to adjust.”

  My younger self stirs a little inside her grief. Waking up.

  “I’ll talk to my husband,” she says. “He’s a hunter. He’ll take care of the dog. I’m glad you told me.”

  That night when Miklos comes in, she is waiting for him. She has bat
hed, dressed, and combed her hair. Margaret has a clean dress on and sits on her lap, silent as always, pensively thumbing a silver spoon.

  “You can’t kill anyone in town, Miklos,” she says. I help her along by mouthing the words. “And not their cows, their chickens, their pets. Stay away from the town.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” he says. I can see that he is trembling; he is afraid of me, after what he saw me do to Arthur. “I did not come to America to have another witch in a castle rule me.”

  This may be the first time she has ever heard him speak of this. She’s angry. Why did he marry a witch and build her a castle if he was only going to hate her for it?

  “You’ll stay away from town, and you won’t kill people, because if you do they’ll kill you,” she says. “That’s why our son is dead. It’s what happens when people are angry.”

  “I’m ready this time. They won’t kill me.”

  “Miklos, you’re not a god. If they cut you into a hundred pieces you will die. And I will die. And our daughter will die.”

  “So?” he says, meaning he doesn’t care what happens to him, or to me. But Margaret, in her lap, begins to groan. He trembles.

  “Little one, I didn’t mean that,” he says. Margaret’s voice is escalating in pitch. She is like her father, born without words. But she is not content to be silent. He shrinks back from us, growling as he goes.

  “Listen to me.” Persephone has to raise her voice higher and higher to be heard over Margaret. “You can hate me. You can live in the woods. I don’t care if I never see you again. But if you kill anyone from town or their animals, you will be killing our child. So promise me right now. Promise me, or we will leave and you will never see us again. And when they come to kill you and burn down your beautiful house—”